- Define and explain The Water Cycle in your own words
- Use key terms such as precipitation accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
Weather is what you get today; climate is what you expect. In this chapter you will follow water around the planet, discover the factors that give places their climates, learn to read climate graphs like a geographer, and examine the evidence for human-caused climate change.
This lesson focuses on The Water Cycle: trace water from sea to cloud to rain through evaporation, condensation and precipitation.
Trace water from sea to cloud to rain through evaporation, condensation and precipitation.
Key ideas
The water cycle never stops
The Sun's heat evaporates water from seas and lakes; rising air cools and the vapour condenses into clouds; precipitation returns water to land and sea, where rivers carry it back to the ocean. The same water has been cycling for billions of years — the water in your glass may once have fallen as rain on a dinosaur.
Five factors shape a climate
Latitude decides how directly the Sun's rays hit; altitude cools the air as you climb; distance from the sea brings milder, wetter weather near coasts and more extreme temperatures inland; prevailing winds carry warm or cold, wet or dry air; and ocean currents, like the warm North Atlantic Drift, can heat or cool coastlines.
Key term — precipitation: Water falling from clouds as rain, snow, sleet or hail.
Put these in order: condensation, precipitation, evaporation.
Evaporation → condensation → precipitation.
Answer: Evaporation → condensation → precipitation.
- Reading rainfall bars as temperature On a climate graph, the bars are monthly rainfall and the line is temperature — mixing them up flips the whole interpretation.
- Saying 'today is cold, so climate change is wrong' One cold day is weather; climate change is about long-term global averages measured over decades. Local cold snaps still happen in a warming world.
Practice
Bars show monthly rainfall (mm); the line shows mean monthly temperature (°C).
Temperature falls with altitude because the air is thinner and under less pressure.
The sea moderates temperatures, warming the coastal town in winter and cooling it in summer; inland places have more extreme continental climates.
Natural: changes in solar output or volcanic eruptions. Human: burning fossil fuels, deforestation.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "precipitation"?
Why does the UK have a milder climate than other places at the same latitude, such as parts of Canada?
- The Water Cycle: trace water from sea to cloud to rain through evaporation, condensation and precipitation.
- The water cycle never stops: The Sun's heat evaporates water from seas and lakes; rising air cools and the vapour condenses into clouds; precipitation returns water to land and sea, where rivers carry it back to the ocean.
- condensation: When water vapour cools and turns back into tiny liquid droplets, forming clouds.
- Watch out for: reading rainfall bars as temperature