Water Essay

Water is an odorless, colorless, tasteless chemical compound that makes up well more than half of the human body. In addition to being prominent in the make-up of the human body, it also covers all but approximately 30% of the Earth’s surface, and can be found naturally in all three states of matter: liquid, solid and gas. Water is a covalent bond known most commonly by its empirical form; H2O. It can also be identified by the Lewis Dot Structural form shown in the figure in the upper right corner of this page (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_formula). To better understand what it means to say that H2O has a “covalent bond”, let’s look at the definition of a covalent bond: A covalent bond is a chemical bond that involves the sharing of electron pairs between atoms. The stable balance of attractive and repulsive forces between atoms when they share electrons is known as covalent bonding. For many molecules, the sharing of electrons allows each atom to attain the equivalent of a full outer shell, corresponding to a stable electronic configuration. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covalent_bond). With respect to that definition, one can ascertain that the covalent bond of water occurs when two hydrogen atoms each share their one electron with one of six electrons in the outer shell of one oxygen atom. In addition to having a covalent bond, water is also a polar bond. This means that there are different charges on opposite bent ends of the molecule.

Now that we know the chemical make up of water, the physical states in which it can appear, and just how prevelant it is in our lives, let’s look further into how exactly it affects our lives. In a very rudimentery breakdown - water provides life for veggitation to grow, animals eat the veggitation and humans eat the animals & plants. But it goes even further than that. Every known organism on planet Earth needs water to survive. For humans specifically, we need water to disolve