IT’S A WATER WATER WORLD
by Arthur W. Siebens, Ph.D., Copyright 2003
to the tune of “If I Had a Hammer,” by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, 1958

It’s a water water world, you can drink it in the morning
It may rain in the evening, there’s more sea than land
It’s a source of danger (e.g., flooding, osmotic lysis)
Reduces cooling and warming (stabilizes temperature in organisms and ecosystems)
It's the main kind of matter in your brothers and your sisters (60-80% of body weight)
The chemistry of water’s something everybody’s got to understand, oo, oo, oo, oo
There’s three kinds of bonds, that water helps demonstrate
All deal with electrons, atoms share or donate
Covalent bonds come from sharing, unpaired electrons pairing
Oxygen and hydrogen are tightly held together
Covalently bonded like they’re holdin’ hands, oo, oo, oo, oo
Electronegative oxygen, hogs those shared electrons (they spend more time around the O nucleus than the H nuclei)
This makes water polar—oxygen’s slightly charged
Oxygen’s a little negative, hydrogen’s a little positive
Hydrogen bonds form, that account for many properties
Of water ‘bout which I’ll now expand oo, oo, oo, oo
Water sticks to itself, it’s called cohesion
There's high surface tension, and high specific heat
High heat of vaporization
Also ice formation (as water expands when water’s H-bonds remain stable at low temperature)
And 'cause of water’s polarity, there’s adhesion and capillarity
It dissolves more substances than any other solvent in the land, oo, oo, oo, oo
Now sodium and chloride, they don’t share electrons
They accept or donate—held together by charge
Chloride is negative, sodium is positive
In the polar solvent water, ions get surrounded
Sodium chloride dissolves as ionic bonds disband oo, oo, oo, oo
REPEAT FIRST VERSE