Question: how do you purify water?

Matt Bower answered on 7 Nov 2018:

Hi ! The first thing is to remove all the solid particles (the bits of dirt etc.). There’s a few ways of doing this but the most common way is to add a chemical, usually made from iron or aluminium, that sort of sticks all the bits together –these can then be taken out easily by passing the water through a filter. Then comes the most important bit, which is to kill any harmful bugs that might be in the water and make people ill. This is done by adding a small amount of disinfectant, usually chlorine. Sometimes that’s it, but other times there are specific things that need to be taken out of the water (like pesticides or certain metals) and that is done using special filters.