Chemistry and its Importance to us

Why is chemistry important? The short answer to this question is that without it, we would still be living as people did in the middle ages. There would be no antibiotics, no plastics, no computers or telephones, no synthetic fabrics, no cosmetics and your understanding of the world around you would be very limited and chemical changes would seem like magic.

Everything that you can see or feel is made from chemical elements and compounds. The way these join together determines their properties, so understanding how chemical changes occur has enabled the human race to progress further and faster than it could have done without an understanding of chemistry. On a day to day basis, you probably don't actually need to know anything at all about chemistry but it helps you to understand the world around you much better. The Victorians had started to understand the rules of chemistry and by combining that new knowledge with engineering, they were able to make life a little better with things that we now take for granted like clean water. On the other hand, in the days when the effects of chemistry on the environment were not well understood, the areas near to chemical factories became very polluted, but nowadays, our understanding of chemistry is important to help to clean up the environment.

Chemistry is often regarded as a complicated subject because it seems that there are so many individual chemical reactions to learn. The secret of chemistry is knowing that atoms behave in predictable ways. Then you learn a few basic definitions and rules to use to work out chemical reactions when you come across them even when you have never used the chemicals before. Too many students of chemistry try to remember reactions - working them out when you need to saves a lot of effort when revising.

For example, if you know the rule that acids react with basic oxides to form a salt and water and the rules for naming salts, you could easily work out what would happen when phosphoric acid reacts with copper oxide - water and copper phosphate would be formed. The hard way would be to try to learn every reaction for every individual acid on the syllabus.