Have you ever been caught out not knowing how to answer one of those tough question, like many of us, a great response has always been “good question, lets look it up on Google”.  Below are a few of those questions and answers that we found on Google 🙂

 

HOW IS ELECTRICITY MADE?
Answer – It comes from magnets! In the early 1800s, Michael Faraday discovered “electromagnetic induction”, which is the scientific way of saying that if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, the wire would become electrified.  In 1882, Thomas Edison opened the first full-scale power plant in New York City. Edison’s electric generator was a bigger version of Faraday’s basic experiment; a big magnet rotates around a wire to produce an electric current.  Today’s power plants are bigger and controlled by computers, but the basic process is still the same as it was nearly 120 years ago.

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE?
Answer – White sunlight is really a lot of different colours of light mixed together. Some colours of light travel through air and dust better than others. Red goes a long, long way.  But blue light gets bounced around a lot. Our blue sky is blue light that has been bounced out of sunlight by gazillions of molecules of air.

WHERE DOES THE WIND COME FROM?
Answer – Wind is “AIR IN MOTION” (or Moving Air) and is made by differences in the AIR PRESSURES. Warm Air rises, pushes up … (like when you open a heated oven’s door and the heat bellows out and goes straight UP to the ceiling like helium filled balloon.) Warm Air is light in weight. While on the other hand, Cold Air is heavy in weight and keeps closer to the earth’s surface. So wind is ‘made’ when the sun heats the earth’s surface and the air near the surface become warmer and lighter.  This warm air rises and while it is rising, cold/cooler air replaces where the warm air left.  Then that cool air is eventually heated and rises, too this process is continual. This movement of air is called, you guessed it…WIND!

WHY IS THE SEA SALTY?
Answer – The sea is salty because the rivers that flow into it wash salts and other minerals out of the ground.  These dissolve in the rivers and the rivers then flow into the sea. Another source of salt is the sea bed. As the Sun evaporates the water from the sea to make clouds, it leaves the salts and minerals behind, so the sea is much saltier than rivers and lakes.  Even though it rains on the sea as on land, this isn’t enough to dilute the salt.

HOW DO PLANES FLY IN THE SKY?
Answer – It may seem unbelievable that a heavy plane can get up into the air, but it’s all down to the clever shape of its wings.  If you look at a plane close up, you’ll see that the top of each wing is curved and the bottom is flat.  As the plane moves forward powered by the engine (in the same way your parents’ car goes when they turn on the engine), air pushes up on the flat bottom of the wing harder than it pushes down on the curved top.  This is what causes it to lift up into the air and then stay there.

WHAT MAKES THUNDER?
Answer – When you see a flash of lightning in the sky, it is often followed by a crashing boom of thunder.  This is because when lightning moves through the sky, it heats up the air to thousands of degrees centigrade – that’s hotter than the surface of the Sun. The heated-up air rushes away into the cooler air surrounding it.  This moving air makes a loud bang, and that is what we call thunder.

WHY DO YOU BLINK?
Answer – The very front of your eye is made of an extremely sensitive see-through screen rather like the windscreen on your parents’ car.  It’s very important that it stays clean and moist so that you can see as well as possible. So every ten or 20 seconds, your eyelids close, spreading a thin layer of tears over your eye which washes off any bits of dust or anything else that may have got into it, like a car’s windscreen wiper with squirty screen wash.  If we didn’t blink so much, we wouldn’t be able to see properly, so it’s lucky we do!

WHERE DO BABIES COME FROM?
Answer – You know chicks come from eggs and plants come from seeds? Well, humans are very special because we come from an egg and a seed.  The dad has the seed inside his body and the mum has the egg in hers, and they give each other a massive cuddle because they love each other so much, and that amazing big hug is like two pieces of a jigsaw fitting together, or two bits of Lego.  That way, the dad’s seed can meet the mum’s egg, and it makes a baby that will be born nine months later.

WHAT HAPPENS TO US WHEN WE DIE?
Answer – WHEN we die, we go back into the earth and the air and the plants, and become a part of all the world again.  Imagine a leaf unfurling bright green in the spring, and then stronger and darker in summer, then turning orange and falling to the ground in autumn.  In the winter, it melts down into the earth to give its goodness back to what will grow next spring. I think our life is like that.  But because human beings love each other, all of us live on in the memories of people we have known.

WHERE DOES WATER COME FROM?
Answer – Most scientists think the Earth’s water came from water-rich asteroids (really tiny planets) and comets raining down on the planet when it was young.  Others think the oceans were home-grown – they may have formed because the young Earth had a thick blanket of a gas called hydrogen, which reacted with chemicals in the Earth’s surface to form lakes and seas.

 

These are just some of the tough questions from children, if you have some experiences or have other answers, share them here.