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📖 Reading Passage

How Rainbows Form

A rainbow is one of nature's most beautiful displays, but it happens because of a simple scientific process. When sunlight passes through tiny water droplets in the air — usually just after rain — something magical occurs. White sunlight is actually made up of many colours mixed together: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When light enters a water droplet, it slows down and bends. This bending is called refraction. The different colours bend by slightly different amounts, spreading the white light into a fan of separate colours — like a prism spreading light into a spectrum. The light then bounces off the back of the droplet and exits, bending once more. When millions of droplets do this at the same time, you see a curved arc of colours in the sky. You always need to have the sun behind you and rain in front of you to see a rainbow. That is why rainbows appear in the east when the sun sets in the west, or in the west when the sun rises in the east.