Importance Of Quality Of Water In Water

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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND
Water is an important natural resource needed for national development and human health. This shows that a nation and its development depend on the availability of water in one way or the other. However, when the available water becomes contaminated it cause more harm than good. In recent times, the change in climatic condition has affected the surface water by causing a lot of small water bodies to dry up and most of the remaining ones are highly contaminated by both natural and anthropogenic activities. This has cause many challenges in different parts of the world especially in developing countries. This has brought a high demand on groundwater as the main source of water supply for drinking, domestic, industrial and agricultural purposes in many parts of the world. The quality of groundwater is equally important as its availability. Hence there is the need manage groundwater resources and this requires information on both its quantity and quality (Mogheir and Singh, 2002).

Water is a universal solvent and dissolves the substances that come into contact with it. However the degree of dissolution of the various substances depends on the number of factors such as the solubility of the substance, the acidity of the water, the temperature at which the reaction takes place etc. Therefore, the quality of groundwater can be easily affected by factors such as irrigation activities, industrialization and urbanization. This makes

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