Name ________________________________ Per ___________
What’s happening in this beaker?
The bubbles indicate that vapor is being formed, which lets you know that a chemical reaction is taking place. Many chemical reactions are going on constantly inside your body.
In fact, there are probably thousands of chemical reactions occurring every second in every one of your cells. And as all living things are comprised of chemicals, understanding how chemicals work is essential to understanding how living things work.
Chemicals of Life - The Elements
If you pull a flower petal from a plant and break it in half, and then take that piece and break it in half again, and take the next piece and break it half, and so on, and so on, until you cannot even see the flower anymore, what do you think you will find? We know that the flower petal is made of cells, but what are cells made of? Scientists have broken down matter, or anything that takes up space and has mass—like a cell—into the smallest pieces that cannot be broken down anymore. Every physical object, including rocks, animals, flowers, and your body, are all made up of matter.
Matter is made up of a mixture of things called elements. Elements are substances that cannot be broken down into simpler substances. There are more than 100 known elements, and 92 occur naturally around us. The others have been made only in the laboratory.
Inside of elements, you will find identical atoms. An atom is the simplest and smallest particle of matter that still has chemical properties of the element. Atoms are the building block of all of the elements that make up the matter in your body or any other living or non-living thing. Atoms are so small that only the most powerful microscopes can see them.
Atoms themselves are composed of even smaller particles, including positively charged protons, uncharged neutrons, and negatively charged electrons. Protons and neutrons are located in the center of the atom, or the nucleus, and the electrons move around the nucleus. How many protons an atom has determines what element it is. For example, hydrogen (H) has just one proton, helium (He) always has two protons (Figure 1.1), while sodium
(Na) always has 11.
All the atoms of a particular element have the exact same number of protons, and the number of protons is that element’s atomic number. An atom usually has the same number of protons and electrons, but sometimes an atom may gain or lose an electron, giving the atom a positive or negative charge. These atoms are known as ions and are depicted with a "+" or "-" sign. Ions, such as H+, Na+, K+, or Cl− have significant biological roles.

The Periodic Table
The Periodic Table In 1869, a Russian scientist named Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table, which is a way of organizing elements according to their unique characteristics, like atomic number, density, boiling point, and other values (Figure 1.2). Each element is represented by a one or two letter symbol. For example, H stands for hydrogen, and Au stands for gold. The vertical columns in the periodic table are known as groups, and elements in groups tend to have very similar properties. The table is also divided into rows, known as periods.
Molecules
A molecule is any combination of two or more atoms. The oxygen in the air we breathe is two oxygen atoms connected by a chemical bond to form O
2
, or molecular oxygen. A carbon dioxide molecule is a combination of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, CO
2
.
What Are Chemical Reactions?
The element chlorine (Cl) is a greenish poison. Would you eat chlorine? Of course not, but you often eat a compound containing chlorine. In fact, you probably eat this chlorine compound just about every day. Do you know what it is? It’s table salt. Table salt is sodium chloride (NaCl), which forms when chlorine and sodium (Na) combine in certain proportions. How does chlorine, a toxic green chemical, change into harmless white table salt? It happens in a chemical reaction. A chemical reaction is a process that changes some chemical substances into others. A substance that starts a chemical reaction is called a reactant, and a substance that forms as a result of a chemical reaction is called a product. During a chemical reaction, the reactants are used up to create the products. An example of a chemical reaction is the burning of methane, which is shown in Figure below. In this chemical reaction, the reactants are methane
(CH
4
) and oxygen (O
2
), and the products are carbon dioxide (CO
2
) and water (H
2
O). A chemical reaction involves the breaking and forming of chemical bonds. When methane burns, bonds break in the methane and oxygen molecules, and new bonds form in the molecules of carbon dioxide and water.

Chemical Equations
A chemical reaction can be represented by a chemical equation. For example, the burning of methane can be represented by the chemical equation:
CH
4
+ 2O
2
→ CO
2
+ 2H
2
O
The arrow in a chemical equation separates the reactants from the products and shows the direction in which the reaction proceeds. If the reaction could occur in the opposite direction as well, two arrows pointing in opposite directions would be used. The number 2 in front of O2 and H2O shows that two oxygen molecules and two water molecules are involved in the reaction. (With no number in front of a chemical symbol, just one molecule is involved.)
Conservation of Matter
In a chemical reaction, the quantity of each element does not change; there is the same amount of each element in the products as there was in the reactants. This is because matter is always conserved. The conservation of matter is reflected in a reaction’s chemical equation. The same number of atoms of each element appears on each side of the arrow. For example, in the chemical equation above, there are four hydrogen atoms on each side of the arrow.
Can you find all four of them on each side of this equation?
Chemical Reactions and Energy
Chemical reactions always involve energy. When methane burns, for example, the chemical energy that was stored in the methane molecule is transformed and released in the form of heat and light. Other chemical reactions absorb energy rather than release it.
Review Questions
1.
What is the difference between atoms and molecules?
2.
What distinguishes atoms of different elements from each other?
3.
Describe the composition of an atom.
4.
How are the elements on the periodic table organized?
(OVER)

5.
What is a chemical reaction?
6.
In the chemical equation CH
4
+ 2O
2
→ CO
2
+ 2H
2
O, what are the reactants? What are the products?
7.
Explain why the chemical equation in Question 6 demonstrates conservation of matter.