化工专业英语文21.doc

Lesson 21 The Water We Drink Despite the abundance of rivers, streams, and lakes throughout most of the populated land area, chances are that the water coming from your kitchen faucet or from a public water fountain was drawn up from the reservoir of ground water. Reaching the surface through wells or springs, this source provides the drinking water for about half the people in the United States and about three-quarters of those of our rivers, streams, and lakes. In chemical terms, ground water and the water we draw from our rivers and other bodies of water are solutions of solutes in a solvent. Water is the solvent; the substances the water picks up in its travels from the clouds, through the earth and into our faucets are the solutes. It’s a combination of the chemistry of the solutes and their concentrations that determines whether the water is polluted. Some of the solutes have been in earth’s water since rain began to fall on the newly formed planet. Partly because of rainwater’s normal acidity (resulting from the carbonic acid it contains) and partly because water itself is a very good solvent for many substances, the rainfall that passes through the soil picks up a variety of minerals from the earth itself. As a result, all the waters of the earth, including those that feed our public and private water supplies and those that furnish commercially bottled “natural” or “mineral” drinking water, contain a variety of minerals in a range of concentrations. Among these are calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, and sodium cations and fluoride anions. The concentrations of representative minerals found in natural spring water of the French Apls. Minerals such as these are usually harmless or beneficial to most of us at their typical levels in natural and in commercially bottled drinking water. And at even higher levels as well. Some of us, for example, take mineral supplements that provide calcium, iron, or magnesium at levels far higher than those found in drinking