Water, water every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
—from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Picture sailors stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean. There’s water everywhere, as far as you can see. After all, the Earth’s surface is almost three-fourths water. But this water is too salty to drink. With no rain in the forecast, the sailors soon run out of drinking water. Their bodies dry out, and the sailors slowly begin to die:
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
All animals and plants need water to survive. The human body is more than three-fourths water. Living things use water to carry nutrients around the body and to carry off waste. Water also helps break down food and keep living things cool, among its other big jobs. What happened to the sailors in the Coleridge poem? Thanks to rain, one lived to tell the story:
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
