John T. Moore EdD
U Can Chemistry I For Dummies®
U Can: Chemistry I For Dummies®
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937641
ISBN 978-1-119-07940-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-07939-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-07952-1 (ebk)
Introduction
In many cases, when students think back to their time in high school or college chemistry, they don’t think of the class fondly (unless perhaps they’re science majors). A lot of people think chemistry is too abstract, too mathematical, too removed from their real lives.
One of the biggest challenges you encounter with chemistry is that you’re forced to work with numbers that have meaning behind them, maybe for the first time. You’re no longer simply doing a math problem with abstract values. Instead, these numbers represent physical quantities, so they’re associated with things like units, measurements, and chemical formulas.
Chemistry is an essential part of life. You encounter it every single day and in some cases may actually enjoy it. Remember making that baking soda and vinegar volcano as a child? That’s chemistry. Do you cook or clean or use nail polish remover? All of that is chemistry. So relax, though you may be struggling a bit here or there in your class; you already have a ton of chemistry experience, because you’ve gotten this far in life. Besides, this book breaks down the very large and complex subject of chemistry into basic ideas that can help with anything you need.
Chemistry is sometimes called the central science (mostly by chemists), because in order to have a good understanding of biology or geology or even physics, you must have a good understanding of chemistry. Ours is a chemical world, and we hope that as you begin to understand chemistry better, you’ll look at the world a bit differently and appreciate the chemical nature of everything. Perhaps, though a crazy notion, you’ll even look back on your chemistry class as one of your favorite experiences in school. A lot of our students do.
About This Book
When you’re fixed in the thickets of a monstrous stoichiometry packet of work or bogged down by buffered solutions, you’ve got little use for someone waxing poetic about the grandeur of chemistry. What you want is help. Simple, easy-to-understand help. Thankfully, you’ll find it here.
This book isn’t structured as you’d expect a normal chemistry text to be set up. There aren’t unnecessary sections explaining concepts that your teacher will gloss over and never mention. Everything in here is something you’d encounter in a general high school chemistry class or a first-semester college course. We help you make sense of chemistry concepts and solve those frustrating chemistry problems.
The focus is on how to solve the problems on your homework and quizzes and tests. Now, the best way to succeed at chemistry is to practice, practice more, and then practice even more. The biggest thing students struggle with in chemistry is simply looking at an example or watching their teacher and thinking they now understand everything. If only things were that easy! To get good at solving problems, you have to try them yourself. Have a blank piece of paper in front of you and try to work out all the practice problems you see in this book as you go. This one piece of advice can help more than any other single thing you do in terms of succeeding in chemistry.
This book is modular. You can pick and choose those chapters and types of problems that challenge you the most; you don’t have to read this book cover to cover if you don’t want to. The best part is that for every practice problem you encounter and try to solve (and you will try to solve them if you want to succeed), we offer a fully worked out and explained solution.
Foolish Assumptions
The basic assumption of this book is that you’re taking a general high school or college level chemistry class and would like a bit of help getting through it. We assume you have a basic level of mathematical ability – things like solving simple algebra problems and performing basic operations like multiplying and dividing are not explained explicitly in this book. We also assume you have a scientific calculator, a graphing calculator, or perhaps a smartphone for the math portions. (Hint: If you turn the calculator app sideways on your smartphone, you’ll likely get a really nice scientific calculator.) That’s pretty much it! Beyond that, you should be totally fine with this book.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re
