As it dissolves a large number of solid, liquid and gaseous substances it's called a universal solvent. It's important for living thing because all of them depend on water to survive. For example, many organisms live in the water and they find some of the nutrients that are necessary for live dissolved in water - gases included.
There is a couple different ways to determine if a bond is ionic orcovalent. By definition, an ionicbond is between a metal and a nonmetal, and a covalent bond is between 2 nonmetals. So you usually just look at the periodic table and determine whether your compound is made of a metal/nonmetal or is just 2 nonmetals.
