Word: gal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lake Mead reservoir, 65 miles to the northwest, you can see the source of all that growth. In a city that receives just 4 in. of rain a year, residents in the sprawling housing developments where much of the Las Vegas population lives use an average of 165 gal. of water a day--and 90% of that comes from Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam in 1935. Lake Mead holds Nevada's 130 billion gal. share of the Colorado River's flow, split with six other states in the West--and for decades, says Pat Mulroy, head...
...reason for the world's growing water woes is evident in the numbers. The planet fairly sloshes with water--326 quintillion gal. of it--but only 0.014% of that is available for human use. The rest is nonpotable ocean water or inaccessible freshwater, most of it frozen in polar caps. And the available water we do have is far from evenly distributed. About 1.1 billion people have no access to clean water, and half the planet lacks the same quality of water that the ancient Romans enjoyed. And while the amount of water on the planet remains fixed, the number...
...problem. The collapse of the country's harvest contributed to a doubling of the price of rice this past spring, which in turn led to food riots in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Egypt. And that's the real impact of water scarcity--food scarcity. It takes 150 gal. of water to grow a pound of wheat, up to 650 gal. for a pound of rice and 3,000 gal. to raise the equivalent of a quarter-pound of beef...
Still, for all Australia's water worries, citizens there don't yet need to fear that when they turn on the tap nothing will come out. That's not the case in India, even in the capital of New Delhi, which supplies about 200 million gal. a day less than its population requires. Water is a worry, not just for poor Indians but also for middle-class ones, like R.K. Sachdev, a retired civil servant who lives with his wife in an upscale development in the city's southwest. "Every morning when I get up, my main worry is water...
...Delhi's bursting slums, residents are often left to fight for buckets of water delivered via trucks, a process that is time consuming and expensive. The Sachdevs pay less than 2¢ per 26 gal. of water; the poor might pay that for a single quart from a private truck or even more for bottled water. "The rich end up paying just a fraction of the price to water their lawn than the poor do just to stay alive," says William Fellows, the regional water, sanitation and health adviser for UNICEF/South Asia. Worse, waste of the little water that is available...