Sound Waves - Latricia

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Sound Waves
by Ian F. Mahaney

Review by Latricia

Sound Waves is an interesting book about sound.  The book tells you that everything is made up of matter and matter is everything that makes up space.

Atoms are tiny bits of matter.  For example, rain, air people breathe and hair on people heads are uncountable atoms.  Water has two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen.  Hydrogen and oxygen are gases and both of them you can't see or smell.  Matter moves around, place to place.

When atoms move place to place, it causes vibrations.  Vibrating atoms and molecules create the sound waves.  For example, a guitar string that has been plucked.  When people talk, part of you is vibrating and air pushes through a part of your throat called the larynx.  The air that passes through part of the larynx called the vocal cords.

Human and animals have three parts of ears.  The first parts are the outer ear, which is the part we can see.  the middle ear includes three small bones called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup.  Finally the inner ear is a combination of tiny hairs and liquid called cochlea.  Cochlea translates vibrations into sound that our brains can understand.

Low frequency sounds are like drumbeats and a high frequency sounds are like birds singing.  The frequencies are the number of sound waves that pass in a second. The human audible is between 20-20,000 hertz.  Frequencies below 20 hertz are infrasound and frequencies about 20,000 hertz are ultrasound.  If sound passes the air it can be between 331 and 350 meters per second.

This book is age appropriate for grades 4 - 8 and ages 9 - 15.  I really liked this book because it taught me things I did not know.  We are also learning about this in class.