From class work and through some reasearch, I have found that water has four main properties: adhesion, cohesion, density,and polarity. However each one of those categories has a sub-categorie. Adhesion has capillary action, cohesion has surface tension, density has specific heat, and polarity contributes for water being the universal solvent. Adhesion is the ability to stick to other things, and an example of capillary action is when someone puts a straw in water the water goes up through the straw, this is because water is adhesive and the water molecules stick to the straw molecules. Cohesion in terms of water is when water molecules come together an stick to other water molecules. Because water is very cohesive it creates surface tension at the top and things like a paperclip that have a greater density than water and should sink, actually are held at the top by that tension. The density of water is 1, and anything with a greater density will sink, and anything with a smaller density will float. Specific heat is related to this because it is the "amount of energy used to raise 1 gram of a substance 1 degree celsius. Last but not least we have polarity, water is polar because of the hydrogen bonds that form intbetween covalent bonds, because of these bonds, water has a slight negative and a slight postive charge which allows it to dissolve many more things than any other solvent.
