Chemistry: A Project of the American Chemical Society

"Everything you hear, see, smell, taste, and touch involves chemistry and chemicals (matter). And hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching all involve intricate series of chemical reactions and interactions in your body. With such an enormous range of topics, chemistry offers you fascinating opportunities to explore and to study. At the same time, the sheer breadth of these possibilities may make chemistry seen a daunting subject to study. Aware of both the fascination and the challenge of studying chemistry, the American Chemical Society chose a team of chemists to consider what concepts would help you open the doors to opportunities and require a knowledge of chemistry without being overwhelming. The team also took up the challenge to develop effective approaches to learning and teaching chemistry. The result of the team's efforts is this textbook, Chemistry, and its complementary materials, including project-based laboratory experiments, your molecular model kit, the Web Companion, and the Personal Tutor. Learning chemistry, even with a limited range of concepts and content, requires a good deal of effort from both you and your instructors. To facilitate your efforts, we have written Chemistry in a conversational tone designed to be accessible and engaging. But you cannot learn chemistry only by reading about it, just as you cannot learn how to write a short story or how to find fossils simply by reading how others do it. Learning how others do something you want to do is important, but you must also practice doing it yourself. Chemists and other scientists learn about the world through experimenting. They then try, often in collaborative efforts, to develop models of the world at the molecular level that explain their results and allow them to predict the outcomes of other possible experiments. We have tried to incorporate this same approach in this textbook. Throughout Chemistry, we present activities and thought-provoking questions that are intended to promote active small-group and whole-class participation." From the Introduction