Earth Lakes Are - Under Threat Reading Answers

Over-allocating river water for local farms can completely destroy a lake thousands of miles downstream.

There are over on our planet, but today, many are a shadow of what they once were. According to a 2024 UNEP analysis, surface water bodies, including lakes, are shrinking or being completely lost in 364 basins worldwide .

You may be asked to fill in a summary of a lake's decline. Focus on keywords like evaporation , sedimentation , and irrigation . Why This Matters

Paragraph E notes that exposed organic sediment decomposes and emits both carbon dioxide and methane. True / False / Not Given earth lakes are under threat reading answers

Paragraph D explicitly defines this process as a consequence of nutrient-rich farming runoff.

Rising temperatures and irrigation dams have turned this lake's water due to an increase in that thrive in the increasingly shallow, salty environment. Answer Key Summary (Questions 1–13)

The Aral Sea crisis was primarily caused by natural environmental shifts. Answer: FALSE (or NO ) Over-allocating river water for local farms can completely

Iran's Lake Urmia highlights how structural manipulation combined with rising temperatures can alter a lake’s fundamental biology. A combination of aggressive damming on feeder rivers and increasingly hot summers drastically lowered the lake's water levels, raising its salinity to extreme levels.

This essay draws on key themes from the passage "Earth’s Lakes Are Under Threat," which highlights the environmental challenges facing vital freshwater bodies like Lake Poopó, the Aral Sea, and Lake Tanganyika.

Rising global temperatures are not merely warming lakes; they are restructuring them. Warmer surface waters reduce oxygen solubility, leading to (low oxygen) in deep layers. Moreover, shorter ice cover periods—a decline of 15 days per decade in the Northern Hemisphere—allow more evaporation. A landmark study in Science (2022) found that warm-water lakes are losing oxygen 2–5 times faster than oceans. You may be asked to fill in a summary of a lake's decline

Answer: tributaries / rivers

The passage details several major lakes experiencing rapid decline, each illustrating a different facet of the global water crisis: Poopó Lake Formerly Bolivia's second-largest lake, it covered roughly 1,000 square kilometers

The reduction in the number or quantity of something.

Answer: evaporation