Wacky Properties of Water

Water, water, water!! I've never thought that the properties of water are so wacky. They are so amazing. Some of them really surprised me because I've never known it before. As biology class always leads us to a world of discoveries, I have found out a lot about water properties in this lesson.

The first thing we did today was to review the test we took last week. I was pretty satisfied with my score. The question that I got wrong was an analogy problem. Mr. Olson taught us how to solve these types of problems. I now know what these problems mean and could solve them by making a sentence using the two words given.

Later, we learned stuff about chemistry of cells. I know that besides water, I am also made of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids. haha... I am made of so many things! In order to let us understand the four classes of organic compounds, Mr. Olson used the powerpoint while explaining.

As sitting on the chair was quite a boring thing, we were told to go to the lab stations to do simple experiments of water after the powerpoint. First, we had to place a drop of water at one end of the wax paper and tried to see how long it would take to get the whole water droplet to the other side. I only used four seconds to do so. That was pretty fast. Then, we had to repeat this thing by using glass slide instead of wax paper. And the result was really contrasting because the water on the glass slide could not be dragged on the glass slide. We finally concluded that water was both cohesive and adhesive. The glass slide is hydrophilic and the paper is hydrophobic. After that, we also did two more experiments. We found out something about capillary action from one of the experiments.

All these experiments are really intriguing. Through them, I can understand better about the WACKY properties of water.

Cohesion & Adhesion

Today in class, we didn't have much to do. We are now on a topic about water and solutions. Mr. Olson used the powerpoint and some animations to let us understand the things more. I understand most of them but I still get confused about the bonds sometimes.

The good thing was that we could do kind of an experiment after this powerpoint. We gonna dropped some water on a penny and also tried to put a paper clip on the water. We had to find out how many drops the penny could hold and also see if the paper clip would float on the water.

Before this little experiment, I guessed that the penny could hold ten drops of water. I thought I would guess wrong because most of the classmates guessed something about three drops. Oh! What a surprise! The penny could totally hold 25 drops. It really shocked me that the tiny little penny could hold such an amount of water. And when Mr. Olson came by my lab station, he used a normal finger and a soapy finger respectively to poke the water on the penny. It surprised me again when I saw that the water poked by the normal finger didn't have much difference while that poked by the soapy finger immediately broke apart. It was really amazing. Mr. Olson said that the reason for this was because of the surface tension on the water surface. Clearly, the soap broke the surface tension.

Well, for the paper clip, I was not successful to make it float on the water. But I was lucky to see one of my friends do it. I think I will try it again if I have the chance.

Time passed by really fast, I was in a hurry to pack away my things when the bell rang. But I was still in deep thought of the interesting experiment after class.