Question

1. When precipitation falls onto land surfaces, it is either soaked into the ground or becomes runoff. Runoff is surface water that travels downhill and drains into streams and rivers.

The area of land where water is drained downhill into a body of water is known as a drainage basin, or _______.
aquifer
water table
watershed
delta

Answer 1

@k_lynn

Answer 2

@AlexandervonHumboldt2

Answer 3

A drainage basin is an extent or an area of land where surface water from rain, melting snow, or ice converges to a single point at a lower elevation, usually the exit of the basin, where the waters join another waterbody, such as a river, lake, reservoir, estuary, wetland, sea, or ocean. For example, a tributary stream of a brook that joins a small river is tributary of a larger river, which is thus part of a series of successively smaller area but higher elevation drainage basins. Similarly, the Missouri and American rivers are each part of their own drainage basins and that of the Mississippi River.

Other terms that are used to describe drainage basins are catchment, catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, and water basin.[1] In North America, the term watershed is commonly used to mean a drainage basin, though in other English-speaking countries, it is used only in its original sense, to mean a drainage divide,[2] the one meaning an area, the other its high elevation perimeter of that area. Drainage basins drain into other drainage basins in a hierarchical pattern, with smaller sub-drainage basins combining into larger drainage basins.[3]