There’s nothing like a
cold glass of refreshing lemonade on a hot summer day! Except when your glass
is sweating! At a Fourth of July party today, I was drinking a cold glass of
lemonade. I set my glass down and went to play a few games with my friends.
When I came back, there were droplets on the outside of the glass and a ring of wetness on
the table underneath the glass! My lemonade was sweating!
Okay, so I may be fantasizing a little bit. My
lemonade wasn’t sweating, it was condensing. Condensation is when a gas becomes
a liquid. Gases are made up of extremely fast particles that take up as much
space as is available. However, when the gas looses thermal energy, or heat
energy, it becomes a liquid. A liquid is a state of matter in which the
particles move slower that a gas. The particles have no particular arrangement,
so they take the shape of their container. In my situation, the warm, July air,
which is a gas, outside the glass was warmer than the glass. When the air
touched the glass, its particles began losing thermal energy. They lost enough
thermal energy to become a liquid- water! The air outside my glass condensed
into water and stayed on my glass. These droplets of water make it look like my
glass is sweating!
