Floculation is the combining of very small pieces into bigger pieces. It's a chemistry term for colloids in solution. The colloids come out of suspension in the form of floc or flakes.
This is called flocculation. When alum is added to water, it reacts with impurities and causes them to clump together, forming sticky globs that can be easily removed.
Adding lime to soil helps to neutralize acidity, improve the soil structure, and provide essential nutrients like calcium to plants. It can also boost microbial activity and enhance the availability of other nutrients in the soil.
If your water is naturally soft it is perfectly safe to drink. If your water has been softened by a "water-softener" it contains sodium ions as a byproduct of the softening process. Having an intake of this much sodium in your drinking water could be detrimental.
That depends on what you mean by sweet. Sweet tasting - add any sweetener - sugar. Sweet is also a word that means clean and drinkable. To make water suitable for drinking depends entirely on where it comes from. Some ground and surface waters are clean enough to need only filtering to take large bugs and rubbish out, and chlorination to kill bacteria etc., to be suitable for pumping into nthe mains. Other teatments include floculation - a process to clump together very fine suspended particles that make the water cloudy, UV treatment to kill bacteria, viruses etc.