A tree is made from air and water? is this true?

Answer 1

That depends on the quality of your water, I suppose.

There is a whole field of study called 'hydroponics' which focuses on how to grow plants in solutions of nutrients instead of dirt. But here's the point: if it were easy, there wouldn't be much of a need to focus study on it! In other words, there are a lot of things that plants get from the soil and even from other life-forms around them.

Another way of looking at what is tree is made of is to look at what it is made of at an elemental or molecular level. For most living plants, 80-90% of their weight is water (as opposed to about 65% for humans). At least 90% of what's left is made up of stuff that's in the air and water (carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen). But that still leaves us with stuff NOT in the air or water... it may be less than 1% of the plant's original weight, but that hardly makes it unnecessary! Some human nutrients may be a hundred-thousandth of the weight of the person who eats them, but he'll still die if they're not there... trees are no different!

So on the one hand, trees are MOSTLY air and water. But unless you have some pretty special 'water', you're doing to need other nutrients which are generally found only in the dirt!

Answer 2

Yes, this is 99.8% true. There was a famous experiment done in the 1700s in which a large tree was grown from a seed in a highly measured and controlled environment, and after the tree was raised, the soil was weighed, and it was found that a several hundred pound tree was grown with the loss of less than an ounce of the soil by weight. The conclusion was that the remainder of the tree's mass must have come from the air and water. This was further proven by burning the tree completly to ashes, and the ashes so generated were nearly precisely equal in weight to the weight of the soil mass that was lost by the soil.
We now know that trees and most other living things are mostly made of water and Carbon, with a smattering of over a dozen or so other elements, which are N,P,K,S,Mg,Ca,Na,Cl,Fe, in that order, as well as extremely small amounts of Zn, Mn,Co,Cr, Se, Cu, I, B,F, which are all essential to life as we know it on Earth. Interestingly, the two most common elements on Earth's surface, other than Oxygen, are Silicon and Aluminum, which are not used by living things at all(!). This has led some to conclude that perhaps life is actually foreign to the Earth and it was seeded to the Earth from somewhere else in outer space long ago(?). It is also true that growing a bunch of trees from seeds will soak up a lot of CO2 out of the air, lessening global warming. So go out and plant a tree!

Answer 3

Well.. not technically. A tree grows from a seed. But it does use the air to go through photosynthesis, using the carbon dioxide to produce glucose, which is the plants food source. Water is also involved in photosynthesis. So they sort of are, but not really. You have to have a seed for a tree to be made.

Answer 4

As a tree grows, or any plant for that matter, it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and uses water to produce sugars that it uses to make cellulose. It needs nitrogen from the soil and other soil nutrients to make the proteins that make up its protoplasm. When you burn wood, you get rid of most of the material that was absorbed from the air and water and what is left as ash is the mineral that were taken up by the roots from the soil.

Answer 5

Except for carbon, all of its compounds are created from air and water...
So, not totally, because there is some carbon...

Answer 6

That is not true.

Trees are much more complex than that.