Application Exercise 22/02/17

1. Boiling- Water can be boiled over a campfire. Bacteria is killed by high boiling temperature but boiling on its own may not get rid of harmful chemicals present in the water. If water is boiled over a campfire, little cost is needed but hikers have to know how to start a fire.

Purification tablets – Add purification tablets to water. Common chemicals present in the tablets are iodine, chlorine or potassium permanganate. These substances kill the bacteria in water by disrupting the ionic balance within the pathogenic cells. This is a simple and inexpensive method.

Evaporation trap- This method requires a container and plastic cover. Place a plastic cover or a large leaf over a container of water and boil the water. Water vapour condenses on the surface of the plastic cover or leaf and can be collected as purified water. However, this is not the fastest way to get potable water.

The most cost efficient and effective method will be to use purification tablets, followed by boiling and lastly evaporation trap. The purification tablet method is the most user-friendly and with some cost (to purchase the tablets) a good volume of potable water can be obtained.

The methods mentioned above use similar concepts of killing bacteria and harmful substances but to purify municipal water supplies, high technology machines and apparatus are required to obtain them.

 

2. Desalination techniques require a high amount of energy to produce relatively small amount of potable drinking water. Thus, a lot of cost is involved in providing the high amount of energy, which is why other cheaper methods are more widely used.

 

3 a. The likely major source of the lead in drinking water is due to the corrosion of lead pipes for the transportation of drinking water to the drinking fountains.

 

3b. The research activities carried out in the chemistry building does not account for the elevated lead levels found in the drinking water. If the chemistry building has a well-developed water-related infrastructure, drinking water and water used after research activities would not be flowing in the same pipe (separated by different pipes). Therefore, the drinking water would not be contaminated by waste water produced by research activities.

 

4. Water-soluble vitamins are soluble in polar solvents such as water. This indicates that these vitamins have several polar groups within their molecular structures and therefore are generally polar. Fat-soluble vitamins, on the other hand, are soluble in non-polar solvents such as fat tissues in the body. Therefore, these vitamins are generally non-polar, having few or no polar groups in their molecular structures.

 

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