Without water all person or living things such as animals and plants will die. We use water to do many thing everyday to take a bath, to wash things, to cook our food, and to do many other things. We drink water about eight glasses a day.
Water is good friend, it helps us in may ways. Irrigation is one of them. When we irrigate, we bring water to fields which need it. Even in the parts of Indonesia where there is a great deal of rain, farmers need to irrigate part of the time, because there is not always rain when they need it. And some fields need a lot of water, our wet rice fields are an example.
For irrigation we often need dams. People have built dams since the early times. There is too little water during the dry season, and there is too much water during the wet season. Dams store water when there is rain. We use that water for our plants when there is little or no rain. In this way, there is water for the plants all of the time. Each plant stores water too, but it is also too little for the needs of the plant during the dry season.
Dams also store water that many of our towns and cities use for all of our needs-we drink it, we wash with it, we use it in our factories, we swim in, we use it everywhere.
Some years ago, there were only a few dams. Then water could be very dangerous. In those days when rainy season came there were many floods. These floods destroyed many house, plants, animals and many people every year. Now in many places, dams hold the rain water, so that it does not destroy things anymore.
Dams can also give us electricity. Factories use electricity all of the time. We use it for the lights in our homes, for our radios and for many other things.
Dams make water a very good friend of people. They can give us protection from floods. Only large dams which are more than thirty metres high can produce electricity well. There are thousand dams this large or larger in the world. People are building more of them now, and they are going to build more of them in the future.
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