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NatureThe Water Cycle
The water cycle has a small number of named stages, and each one has a specific job. Below: the vocabulary that describes them.
Choose your difficulty
Pick a level to start playing. You can switch at any time.
How to play
Read the term, then tap what it means.
Tip: your progress and best score are saved in this browser only.
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NatureWhat you are actually practicing
The water cycle is one of the best-taught systems in science, and it still tends to be learned as a loose set of arrows rather than as a set of named jobs. Each stage has a specific name and a specific description, and getting them straight makes weather, rivers and groundwater far easier to reason about.
The vocabulary also travels. Words like aquifer and watershed show up in news reports about drought and flooding, so this is a practical set as well as a scientific one.
How the game works
You are shown a term and four possible meanings. Tap the correct one. A wrong pick shows the answer immediately.
Easy covers the five stages everyone learns in school. Medium adds the terms that describe water underground and in the soil. Hard uses the full list, including the rarer words.
The links worth knowing
The main loop: evaporation turns liquid water into vapour. Condensation turns that vapour back into liquid droplets, which is how clouds form. Precipitation is water falling as rain, snow or hail. Collection is water gathering in rivers, lakes and oceans. Transpiration is plants releasing water vapour into the air.
Water underground: infiltration is water soaking into the soil. Groundwater is water stored below the surface, and the water table is its upper level. An aquifer is a layer of permeable rock that holds groundwater. Recharge is water seeping down to refill it.
Moving and measuring: runoff is water flowing over the land. A watershed is the land area draining into one river, and a tributary is a smaller stream joining a main river. An estuary is where a river meets the sea.
Less common: sublimation is ice turning straight into vapour, and evapotranspiration combines evaporation with the water plants release. A flash flood arrives with little warning, while desiccation simply means drying out.
How to get faster
Work backwards from the question. If water is falling, it is precipitation. If it is rising from the soil into roots, that is evaporation or transpiration. Sorting by direction of movement separates almost every pair.
A note on the odd ones
Not every stage involves the atmosphere. Infiltration and recharge are entirely underground, and collection happens on the surface. Half the terms describe water moving up and down, the other half describe it being stored.