The Chemistry Book

Unit 0

Unit 0 is an introduction to chemistry, the textbook, and the website. Unit 0 is California content standards for investigation and experimentation. Textbook chapters include 1 and 5. A unit 0 test focuses on the concepts and vocabulary.

State Standards

1. Investigation & Experimentation

Theme

Alchemy is the precursor to modern chemistry.

Topics

1. What is chemistry?
2. History of chemistry
3. Scientific method
4. Lab safety
5. Lab equipment
6. Measurements
7. Scientific notation
8. Significant figures
9. SI Units
10. Length, Volume, and Mass
11. Temperature
12. Density
13. Equivalence statements
14. Dimensional analysis
15. Mathematics
16. Unit 0: Assessment

Objectives

For the test you need to know the following terms and concepts. Review the lecture notes, lab notes, reading packets, vocabulary lists, homework, quizzes, and textbook chapters 1 and 5.

• Define chemistry
• Identify five traditional areas of study in chemistry
• Relate pure chemistry to applied chemistry
• Distinguish between macroscopic and microscopic views
• Explain how alchemy laid the groundwork for chemistry
• Describe how Lavoisier transformed chemistry
• Identify the steps in the scientific method
• Define hypothesis, theory, and law
• Define qualitative and quantitative observations
• Convert measurements to scientific notation
• Distinguish among the accuracy, precision, and error of a measurement
• Identify the number of significant figures to a measurement and in the result of a calculation
• List SI units of measurement and common SI prefixes
• Distinguish between the mass and weight of an object
• Construct conversion factors from equivalent measurements
• Apply the techniques of dimensional analysis to a variety of conversion problems
• Solve problems by breaking the solution into steps
• Convert complex units, using dimensional analysis
• Calculate the density of a material from experimental data

Classroom Resources

1. Learning Guides

Articles in Unit 0

Featured Articles For Unit 0 Students interested in earning credit by editing articles should start with the featured articles. Article #1 Numerous definitions exist for chemistry. For the sake of simplicity, chemistry is a science that studies matter and energy and its interactions. Brown, LeMay and Bursten suggested that chemistry is the central science because chemistry touches so many other subjects. Chemistry has its roots with the medieval practice of alchemy, which had two goals: to try to turn substances into gold and to prolong life. read more and edit   Article #2 Chemical research follows an approach to study known as the scientific method, however, "intuition and imagination play an important part in the scientific method." [1] read more and edit