WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE; BOTTLED OR TAP, IT'S LIQUID LIFE FOR HUMAN RACE : H2OHHH, IT'S ALL SO CONFUSING.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

Quick quiz: List everything you know about water.

It's wet. Got it.

Its chemical symbol is something like H2O. Right.

The stuff makes up about two-thirds of the planet. You should drink eight glasses a day. Some guy brings it to your house or office in 5-gallon bottles and turns them upside down.

And on and on.

What there is to know about water probably wouldn't even fit into the Pacific Ocean. But, as the temperatures rise, as you start reaching for the Sparkletts bottle or drinking fountain, as you start thinking about the swimming pool, water comes into sharper focus.

Or it should. The National Weather Service has predicted a hotter-than-usual summer, and doctors say that most of us don't drink enough as it is.

But it even seems that - could it be? - there's more of that abundant clear stuff. Some of it's caffeinated. Some comes in tiny blue bottles. Some straps to your back and can be sucked through a straw.

It may even be an exciting time to look into the substance that, up until two years ago, remained the most popular beverage on Earth. People are drinking twice as much bottled water as a decade ago, California tap water tastes better than ever and, chances are, you're still not drinking enough.

And a few more things you don't know about water ...

1. Water is not water: Water - simple, pure, unsullied water - is exactly one part hydrogen molecules and two parts oxygen molecules. You know, ``H-two-oh.'' But the slippery substance we know as ``water'' is hardly ever simple or pure.

``When you really get into it, water isn't water,'' says Dr. Bruce Fowler, director of the toxicology program at the University of Maryland.

The clear liquid you drink may contain any number of substances, some added by nature, some added by man, some tasty, some dangerous. When you pour yourself a glass of water, either from the tap or a store-bought bottle, you might need an ingredient label.

There could be minerals - mostly sodium, potassium and calcium - that get picked up from the soil and provide what pure H2O lacks, a taste. Maybe there's fluoride, which is added by some municipal water sources to improve public dental health. Some old house pipes might seep lead into tap water. Spring water may bubble and sparkle with carbon dioxide. Tap water will have some chlorine, which is added by treatment plants to kill bacteria. And, the thing that worries Fowler (and the two congressional commissions on which he serves) most, are the possible chlorination byproducts.

The chlorine, necessary to prevent disease, might react with one of the 70,000 known commercial chemicals floating around the world. Fowler studies how they react with the invisible contents of water.

``If you're sitting in a high-tech office building with synthetic carpets and things on the walls, those will give off gas, especially if they're new,'' he explains. ``It's the combination of things that are coming out of those products that's dangerous.''

2. You are water. So are aliens: The human body is a big chemical soup. We're essentially bags of water, hosting millions of little chemical experiments. All life in the known universe takes place in water solutions, explains Taeboem Oh, professor of organic chemistry at California State University, Northridge.

``We living things are just a bunch of chemical reactions,'' he says. ``Water is the media that allows chemical reactions, and life, to occur.''

Even in the world's most desolate locations, even in Death Valley or underneath the Arctic Circle, there is water, and there is life. Indeed, astronomers jumped up and down a few months ago when they discovered water under the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.

3. Eight glasses a day is just the beginning: The problem with being 65 percent water and living on dry land is that you have to drink. A lot. Parts of you just seep through your skin and vanish.

Conventional wisdom says that you should drink eight glasses, or a half gallon, of water a day. But that's if you're standing still. You can sweat eight glasses in an hour on a hot day.

``Thirst is not an accurate indicator of when you need water,'' explains Dr. Robert Hosey, who works with UCLA's sports medicine division. ``You don't actually become thirsty until you lose 1 percent of your body weight in water.''

He suggests 4 to 8 ounces (half a glass to a full glass) every 15 minutes during exercise and then, afterward, two glasses for every pound you lost to sweat. (He suggests weighing yourself before and after).

The best way to tell if you're drinking enough, says Eric Malone, director of Pacific Crest Outward Bound School in California, is to check your urine.

``You know you're hydrated,'' he adds, ``when your pee is clear. Copious and clear.''

4. Caffeine sucks water out of you: You can drink all the soda and coffee you want, but you'll still be thirsty. Caffeine forces your kidneys to create urine prematurely, draining your body of much-needed water before your intestines absorb it.

``People say they're thirsty and they drank, what, four cups of coffee and two Cokes?'' says Malone, the wilderness survival guide. ``Duh, you're thirsty!''

5. All bottles are not created equal: Two kinds of people have helped double the bottled-water industry in the last decade, says Jennifer Levin, spokeswoman for the International Bottled Water Association: those who want less in their water and those who want more.

Whether clear, ridged, blue-tinted or whatever, these bottles have muscled more supermarket shelf space, springing from 1.2 billion gallons in 1986 to 2.9 billion last year. While the majority of people still reach for the tap when thirsty, Californians drink the most bottled water per capita, downing an average of 20 gallons each year.

Depending on the name, some of this fluid comes from mineral-rich underground springs (water with taste) or could be tap water sent through a purification process such as reverse osmosis or distillation or passing under ultraviolet light (flavorless water).

The brands, too, have become a part of mainstream culture, showing up on sitcoms and movies, usually pushed by a product placement agent.

``It's marketing, marketing, marketing,'' explains J.W. Rone, director of Toast to the Tap, a water-tasting competition and festival in West Virginia. ``The other thing is the taste factor. A lot of people are introduced to bottled water through disaster situations, earthquakes and such, and they acquire the taste.''

6. Water created Southern California: If you were thinking about moving to Los Angeles in the late 1800s, the place looked like a tropical paradise. Even though the city and surrounding valleys resembled arid deserts, the literature used to promote Los Angeles' image to the world had a more lush look, says Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

A new exhibit there, running though Aug. 31, displays such things as real-estate ads, Chamber of Commerce brochures and orange crates that molded a singular, popular vision of Los Angeles, a vision that lured people here between 1880 and 1930, a vision flowing with one thing the preaqueduct-era city lacked: water.

``You see things in these images like gushing artesian wells. You have these monumental fruits and vegetables. You have things like a bird's-eye view showing the Los Angeles River as this huge watery artery running through the city,'' Watts says. ``And once water was tapped through various means, it did become like the promised land for a lot of people.''

7. People still love tap water: Like most people in Southern California, Herb Conrad drinks the water. The average household drinks between 1.4 and 2.9 gallons of water a day, according to the Department of Water and Power.

Conrad is president of Ecological Systems Corp. in Long Beach, a lab that scrutinizes products of Dominguez Water Co., which services outlying areas of Southern California. He takes 30 samples of public water and tests for 136 contaminants, making sure that the added chlorine and chloromines got rid of the bacteria, pesticides and other invisibles.

``In California, people have been led by all sorts of advertising and personal experiences that bottled water tastes better,'' he says. ``My personal feeling is that most people don't know the difference.''

8. You have seen the words ``reverse osmosis,'' and you don't even know it: In the past year, stores have popped up around the Valley with names like ``Water'' and ``1 Water'' and ``Aqua Water,'' and all they sell is, basically, water. For 25 cents a gallon.

The signs might as well read ``The Reverse Osmosis Stores,'' touting the proven and complicated-sounding process that removes chemicals, especially chlorine, from regular ol' tap water.

``It's a filtering system that makes the water very pure,'' explains Richard Myung, owner of Aqua Water in Reseda. His room full of gorilla-sized cylinders and tubes and pipes can force 4,500 gallons of tap water a day through filtering screens, essentially squeezing out the chlorine taste. Smaller versions of these machines can be installed under your sink (for a few hundred dollars), and larger ones are hauled around foreign countries by the U.S. Army to provide clean water in wartime situations.

9. Just because you're near a mountain and a spring doesn't mean you should drink the water: Sure, nothing could be more natural than water. But you don't necessarily want to drink what you find in the wild.

``Pretty much throughout any wilderness area in California, all water is contaminated,'' says Malone with Outward Bound, a program that teaches wilderness survival and self-esteem. ``Unless it's from a spring right out of the ground or right off a snow melt, you have to assume it has something called giardia.''

The bacteria can cause diarrhea and other nastiness, he says, so campers and hikers should add iodine drops or tablets to water found in the wild.

10. Southern California water tastes great

That's according to a national taste test in Berkeley Springs, W. Va., a town famous for its water and annual festival devoted to the liquid.

During this year's Winter Festival of the Waters and Toast to the Tap, 83 varieties from across the country competed, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California won fourth place in taste. (The top three were Dubuque, Iowa; Desert Hot Springs, Calif.; and Dover, Del.)

The world's largest supplier of treated water in the world beat beverages from exotic locales such as Bluefield, W. Va.; Pittsburgh; Hendersonville, N.C.; and Baton Rouge, La.

``It's no surprise that American manufacturers of municipal water make the cleanest city water in the world. Atlantic City, N.J., won three years in a row,'' says festival director Rone. ``Of course, you're bringing your water right out of the mountains in California. You've got pretty clean water to start with.''

It's all clear, colorless and calorie-free, but not all bottled water is the same. The numerous brands and varieties in the grocery store bear very specific labels defined and required by the Food and Drug Administration. For example:

Drinking: Another way of saying bottled water. It has no added sweeteners or flavors, and is sold in clean containers. If sweeteners and flavors comprise more than 1 percent of the fluid, then it's a soft drink.

Mineral: Water that contains ``dissolved solids,'' or minerals, of not less than 250 parts per million, which is more than in most drinking water. Those dissolved solids give mineral water a distinctive taste. Also, the deposits already have to be in it when it is pulled from the ground.

Purified: Any water that has been treated through deionization, distillation, reverse osmosis or other methods of removing metals, chemicals and flavor. This also can be called ``distilled water,'' ``deionized water'' or ``reverse osmosis'' water.

Sparkling: Water that contains the same amount of that bubbly carbon dioxide stuff it had when pulled from the ground, which can be added back into it after it is purified. (Soda and seltzer waters may have sugar and calories and so don't count.)

Spring: Water from an underground source that flows to the surface and is bottled basically as-is.

Well: Water pulled from a hole into an aquifer, an underground water-generating layer of rock or sand.

Artesian: Water that comes from a confined aquifer, where the water level exceeds the container's level and flows upward.

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos, box

PHOTO (1) Herb Conrad is president of Ecological Systems Corp., which tests tap water for contaminants. His take on bottled water: ``My personal feeling is that most people don't know the difference.''

John McCoy/Daily News

(2) Richard Myung of Aqua Water in Reseda can filter 4,500 gallons of tap water a day to purify it and squeeze out the chlorine taste.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News

(3) A lush Southern California is touted on a circa 1893 orange-crate label, part of the ``Envisioning Eden: Water and the Selling of Los Angeles, 1880-1930'' exhibit at the Huntington Library.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News

(4 -- color) Water works

BOX: H20hhh, it's all so confusing (see text)