If you are going for your Bachelor's degree, chances are, your field of study will require you to take chemistry to fulfill your science requirement. Like math, some students freak out over science, fearing they are not up to the challenge of learning scientific material. What they end up discovering is that chemistry, although challenging, is a whole lot of fun!Chemistry is especially fun when you get into the lab portion of the course and work with equipment and real materials and solutions in order to conduct experiments. However, before the hands-on lab activities, the student must learn the basics like chemical reactions, atoms and bonding, acids, bases, and solutions. And most importantly, students must learn how to read and use the Periodic Table.
Once you are in the lab, you will learn right away, if you mix some elements together, nothing happens. Mix other certain elements, and the mixture can be explosive. And then there are other combinations that produce a slow reaction or respond only when heated. In order to know which combination of electrons to pair up, you must first know the number of valence electrons that are in an atom. This information can only be found in the Periodic Table.
The Periodic Table is a system used for organizing elements into categories based on how they react when combined with others. And the manners in which the elements are organized, gives insight into their protons and electrons. All the atoms of one kind of element will have the same number of protons. For example, all carbon atoms have the same number of protons because each one is a part of the carbon family.
When you view a Periodic Table, you will notice elements are arranged from left to right and top to bottom in ascending atomic number. Elements that are in the same vertical column are known as a "group" or "family." Each family has its own characteristic properties based on its number of valence electrons. Rows across the table is called "periods." The number of valence electrons increases from left to right as well.
Comparing families of elements reveal which electrons are inactive and reactive. Noble gases, or "inert" gases are inactive. On the other hand, reactive nonmetals, like the Halogen family react easily with other elements. And, reactive metals, like Alkali metal family, can be chemically stable with some electrons within their family, but violently explosive with others in the group.
The Father of the Periodic Table was a Russian chemistry professor named Dmitri Mendeleev. His original chart was unique in that it resembled a calendar. Down each column he listed similar properties and across he placed all of the elements that repeated properties. Upon completing his table, Mendeleev noticed there were missing spaces that could not be filled by any known element. Instead of thinking of them as defects, he let the blank spaces represented elements that had not yet been discovered, and he was right. Ultimately, the missing elements were discovered.
