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Ship over Rose Garden An ore boat on Lake Superior, seen from the Rose Garden, in Leif Erikson Park, in Duluth, Minnesota.

A satellite view A NASA satellite view of Lake Baikal in Siberia — the world's deepest lake.

water facts

• Every day you need an average of 2.5 quarts of water
• You can live a month without food (though we don't recommend you try it), but only a week without water
• On the average, we use 125 gallons of water per day
• A gallon of water weighs 8.33 pounds
• The deepest, oldest lake in the world is Lake Baikal, in Siberia. It's 6,365 ft. deep and 25 million years old. It also holds one-fifth of the world's available fresh water.
• The largest freshwater lake in the world, in terms of surface area, is our own Lake Superior, covering an area of 32,000 sq. mi.
• If you dump four quarts of oil into the storm sewer, you can cause an oil slick of eight acres.
• Water constitutes 50–70 percent of the human body's weight.
• Teeth are about 5 percent of body weight.
• If body water is cut just 4–5 percent, your work performance will be cut 20–30 percent.
• Most foods hold a lot of water, so you get about 3.5 cups from what you eat every day. Your metabolism itself also produces another half cup of water daily.