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Fresh Air
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Can you fill in the gaps? '
One may live for many days without ___________
and only a few days without ___________
but only a few moments without __________
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Air is the first need of life. There is always a few seconds anxiety until a baby takes its first deep breath and cries. A layman's way of knowing when someone has died is when they have stopped taking in air, when they have stopped breathing. Breathing the air around us is something we do from our first to our last moments. (Ans. food; water, air.)
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What is AIR?
It is a thick layer of mixed gases, about 12 miles deep wrapped around the earth. There are two main ones, nitrogen and oxygen, with about four parts nitrogen to one part oxygen. The other gases, argon, neon, carbon dioxide, krypton, xenon and others, are in very minute quantities. The other most important element in the air we breathe is water vapour. All these elements are constantly being mixed up by the turbulence of the air. Air is always on the move. We know this movement in the air as ‘wind’. It can be gentle or stormy, breezes or gales, and sometimes destructive as during hurricanes and tornadoes.
Another name for our air is the 'atmosphere'. 'Atmos' means breath, so the atmosphere is the sphere of breathing, the place where we can breathe. On very high mountains, one can feel very 'out of puff' as the atmosphere is rarefied. At the height at which planes fly there is not enough atmosphere for us to live, and so they show you how to use oxygen masks for an emergency.
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Our atmosphere is beautiful.
The beauty of the atmosphere has always appealed to poets and painters. The different aspects it shows are favourite subjects for photographers too, and there are very few of us who have not looked up at the sky and marvelled at the colours and the shapes. It is the air with its gases and water vapour, that give us wonderful sunsets (although sadly, pollution is an additional factor), the deep blue of an early summer morning, rainbows after sunny showers, clouds of all kinds, quiet peaceful, barred clouds in the evening sky, mackerel sky before rain, or the towers of cloud before a storm. When we were children we all imagined lakes and dragons and mythical animals in the cloud shapes. There is the wonder of the lightning, the deep forks that rend the sky or sheet lightning of summer nights; or the glow of dawn, or haloes around the sun and moon. Further north or south are the flickering polar lights with their curtains of colour. In winter we have the beauties of snow. All this ever changing beauty round us is provided by the atmosphere, the same air that we breathe.
We take our ability to live and breathe for granted, but our home is a living planet. The moon, by contrast, has no atmosphere and is a dead world. |
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| Every cell of our bodies needs air. |
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