Air Pressure Experiment - Cup on Card Demo

Learn about air pressure with this simple cup on card demo that you can try at home.

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Transcript:

Hey everyone, I'm Chrissie. I'm a science communication student at the Australian National University in Canberra and today we're going to learn all about air pressure.

We can't see air but if we could we would be able to see that it's pushing in all directions around us and there's air particles bouncing around taking up space.

Now, I brought something along to help us see this. So, this bottle has air inside it but you can't see the air. You can see through it. But, if I try to crush the bottle I can't crush it very much because the air inside it is taking up all that space.

Air pressure can either be high air pressure or low air pressure and it depends on how many particles are bouncing around in a space.

So, with low air pressure there are less particles bouncing around and they've got more space to bounce around. And with high air pressure, they're bouncing around much more closely to each other and have less space.

Now, high air pressure always wants to move to where there's lower air pressure so they have more space to bounce around.

You can think of it this way, if you saw one bus coming and it was completely packed with people and there was another bus just behind it with a few people on it which bus would you want to be on?

I'm going to show you a really simple yet surprising air pressure experiment that you can try at home. All you're going to need is some water, a cup, and a piece of card.

Step 1: pour some water into your cup. Step 2: place your card on top. Step 3: hold the card in place while you tip the cup upside down. Step 4: remove your hand from the card.

So you might be wondering, why the water isn't falling out of the cup when you let go of the card. And this can all be explained by air pressure. So like we were talking about earlier there's air pushing in all directions around us and when we do this trick here with the cup and the card there's air pressure that's actually pushing up against this card holding it in place so that the water doesn't fall out.

That is, of course, unless you're a bit clumsy like me. Now if you can think of any other really cool ways of demonstrating air pressure please share them in the comments below.

Thanks for watching. Bye!

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