Explore: The Difference between Hot and Cold

The difference between heat and temperature is important.

Have you ever been sick with a fever? When you have a fever, the temperature of your body is too high. When someone touches your forehead, it will feel warmer than usual.

Another way to check temperature is to use a thermometer, a device that measures temperature. Why would someone use a thermometer to check temperature when he or she can just use his or her hand to feel if something is warm? The answer is simple! Human skin may be able to sense whether something feels hot, warm, cool, or cold, but it cannot tell what the actual temperature is. Temperature is a quantity – a number – and your skin cannot report numbers to you when you touch something! Your skin is good only for sensing the movement of heat.

  Video

Watch this BrainPop video: What is temperature?

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Heat is a form of energy.  When something is warmer, it has more energy.  This is how your skin feels warm and cool things.  It is because of heat moving from place to place (cold does NOT move).  When heat leaves your skin (such as when you are touching an ice cube), your skin senses cold.  When heat enters your skin (such as when you touch a car that has been out in the Sun), your skin senses warmth.

Understanding temperature and how heat moves is key to understanding how air moves in weather systems.  You will explore heat and temperature in the next activity.

How good are your hands at detecting different temperatures?

Materials

  • 3 containers that can hold water and are large enough to put your hand in (such as buckets or large bowls)
  • clock or stopwatch
  • cold water, warm water, and room temperature (not warm or cold) water
  • ADLC Digital Lesson: Feeling Warm and Cold

Notebook

Click here to download the instructions for this activity. Save to your Weather Notebook.


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  Check Your Answers

Once you have completed this activity, check your answers below. 

If you did this activity correctly, you should have discovered that your hands can be easily "fooled" when detecting different temperatures.  Although your hands are perfectly good for sensing heat, they are not so good at detecting the exact temperature of a substance.  To detect temperature, a thermometer is better.