Alexander Gonzales, age 9, of Houston, Texas, for his question:

What makes sea taste so salty?

Pour a glass of clean clear water. Now add a pinch of salt and stir it around. In less than a minute, the salt disappears, so it seems. Actually the salt dissolved in the water. Its little white grains brake up into fine, fine fragments, too small for your eyes to see. water also dissolves all sorts of rocky stones and minerals. And many rocks contain salty chemicals.

Streams and rivers run over the round, washing the stones and rocks as they roll. into the running water dissolves salty chemicals from the rocks. Finally the :rivers run doom to the sea. There they dump their salty chemicals into the ocean. Every day, the sun evaporates water from the sea. But it leaves the dissolved chemicals behind. Every day, the rivers dump in more dissolved chemicals so the sea gets saltier all the tine.