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Water Cycle What to Study Sheet Answers
1. What is evaporation?
a. When water changes from a liquid to a gas. The gas form of liquid
water is called water vapor.
2. What are the five steps of the water cycle?
a. The Sun heats up the Ocean
b. Ocean water evaporates and rises into the air
c. The water vapor cools and condenses to become droplets, which form
clouds.
d. If enough water condenses, the drops become heavy enough to fall to
the ground as rain and snow.
e. Some rain collects in ground wells. The rest flows through rivers back
into the ocean.
3. What powers the water cycle?
a. The Sun
4. What is condensation?
a. Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming
clouds.
5. What is precipitation?
a. Occurs when so much water has condensed that the air cannot hold it
anymore. The clouds get heavy and water falls back to the earth in the
form of rain, hail, sleet or snow
6. What is sublimation?
a. The change of snow or ice to water vapor without melting
b. Solid  gas
7. What are the three states of matter that water can turn into?
a. Liquid
b. Gas
c. Solid
8. What is an aquifer?
a. An underground layer of water-bearing porous stone, earth, or
gravel
9. What is transpiration?
a. The process by which plants lose water out of their leaves.
10. What does permeable mean?
a. Capable of being penetrated by liquids or gases (Meaning liquids and
gases can get through.
11. What does infiltration mean?
a. When water seeps into the subsurface soil and rock.
12. What are the factors that affect runoff?
a. Steepness of slope
b. Amount of Rainfall
c. Rate of rainfall
d. Type of soil
e. Vegetation
13. What is accumulation in terms of the water cycle?
a. the process in which water pools in large bodies (like oceans,
seas and lakes).
14. What is another name for the water cycle?
a. Hydrologic Cycle
15. Is there a beginning or end to the water cycle?
a. Technically no because water is not being created or destroyed. Yes
Evaporation is considered the first step.
16. The water cycle is like what other cycle?
a. The Rock Cycle
17. Where is most of the water found on Earth?
a. Oceans
18. If most of the water that is evaporated is coming from oceans, seas, and lakes
where does the other percent of evaporated water come from?
a. Plants (Transpiration)
19. What are the factors that affect transpiration?
a. The amount of Sunlight (The more sunlight the better)
b. Temperature (The higher the temperature the fast transpiration will
happen)
c. Type of plant (An Oak Tree will transpire more than a Cactus)
d. Soil Moisture (If water loss occurs and this loss of water is not
replaced by water in the soil, a plant will not longer be able to
transpire quickly.)
e. Air Movement and Wind (The more breeze the more transpiration)
20. What is responsible for the formation of clouds?
a. Condensation
21. How many cloud droplets are required to make a single rain drop?
a. Millions
22. How do clouds form?
a. From Condensation
b. All air contains water, but near the ground it is usually in the form of
an invisible gas called water vapor. When warm air rises, it expands
and cools. Cool air can't hold as much water vapor as warm air, so
some of the vapor condenses onto tiny pieces of dust that are floating
in the air and forms a tiny droplet around each dust particle. When
billions of these droplets come together they become a visible cloud.
23. What is a watershed?
a. A watershed is an area of land where all of the water that falls in it
and drains off of it goes into the same place.
24. What is a water table?
a. The top of the surface where ground water occurs is called the water
table
25. What is the water cycle?
a. The cycle of evaporation and condensation that controls the
distribution of the earth's water as it evaporates from bodies of water,
condenses, precipitates, and returns to those bodies of water.
26. What are some of the different forms of precipitation?
a. Rain
b. Sleet
c. Snow
d. Hail
27. What is the saturated zone?
a. The rock and soil in which all the open spaces are filled with water is
called the saturated (or saturation) zone.
28. What is Runoff?
a. The water flow that occurs when the soil is infiltrated to full capacity
and excess water from rain, meltwater, or other sources flows over
the land.
You have been drawing and working with different diagrams of the water cycle.
Make sure you are able to recognize each step of the water cycle.