Water Property Demo

In class today, we did our water property demonstrations with our partners. The water property my group had was pH and litmus paper. The pH is a scale that determines if a substance is more acidic or basic. Our demonstration shows just that. We chose to demonstrate six different substances and where they compare to water. Every substance is acidic, basic, or neutral. That’s what we are trying to decide with this lab and our topic. When we explained that the red paper turns blue for bases and the blue paper turns red for acids, they could tell the difference between substances. Then we went on to tell them about water and how it applies to aquatic ecosystems. Pure water is neutral on the scale, neither acidic nor basic. That helps define the property of water as classifying it as neutral. This neutral property of water can be applied to the aquatic ecosystems. Rivers, ponds, lakes, and wetlands are aquatic ecosystems that have one thing in common, freshwater. Freshwater needs to be neutral in order for the plant life and fish not to be affected. Having a high acidic level and a high basic level can create bacteria causing the aquarium to be a harmful environment. In conclusion, the pH level should remain mostly neutral to keep the aquatic ecosystem a safe environment. The demo went as planned for the most part. We weren’t quite sure on how was going to say what, how the other students would do with the substances, or what order in which we would perform our demo. Having said that, I would say that it went pretty well for us.

Aside from my demo though, I enjoyed watching all the other demos. My favorite one was where they were talking about specific heat of water. The balloon would burn with no water in it, but wouldn’t burn with water in it due to a high specific heat of water. Another fun one was where they talked about the mixture, solution, and suspension. I liked how two substances could either mix or stay divided. Another cool demonstration was the density with water, oil, and alcohol. They colored the liquids in order to show how they all have different densities. One floated to the top, the other in the middle, and the final at the bottom. I also learned about adhesion and cohesion. Cohesion is where water only attracts water, while adhesion attracts other substances. In addition, turbidity is the measure of relative clarity of a liquid. I thought it was cool to learn about all these properties of water and enjoyed the demonstrations.