Community College Chemistry Teaching
for Community College Chemistry Courses and Lab Books
for Community College Chemistry Courses and Lab Books
Answers:
1. Credit: "Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, USA" by Tearstone is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
e. There are more than 3 chemicals in this photo, including air, which consists of mostly nitrogen and oxygen; water, which contains salt, other minerals, marine life; steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon and other elements to modify its properties; orange paint, which includes a zinc-based primer (zinc as a sacrificial metal that rusts preferentially over iron), and the “International Orange” pigment.
2. Credit: "Earth - Global Elevation Model with Satellite Imagery (Version 2)" by Kevin M. Gill is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
e. There are a lot of chemicals: “219 million organic substances, alloys, coordination compounds, minerals, mixtures, polymers, and salts disclosed in publications since the early 1800s.” (https://www.cas.org/cas-data/cas-registry)
Chemicals and chemistry are all around us. The most abundant element in the universe is hydrogen.
3. c. 6 elements – most compounds contain some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
4. Credit: "Tobolsk-Polimer chemical plant" by Presidential Press and Information Office is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
c. Chemistry is big bucks.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_industry#
World chemical output = $5 trillion
US chemical output = $750 billion
Polymers are the largest revenue segment, e.g., polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene, polystyrene.
Sulfuric acid is the most produced chemical in the US.
Largest chemical companies: BASF ($64 billion in 2015, Germany), Dow Chemical ($49 billion in 2015, US)
2023 Mean annual wage for chemists = $95,600 (https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes192031.htm )
5. Maillard reaction. See https://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i40/Maillard-Reaction-Turns-100.html
“The Maillard is, by far, the most widely practiced chemical reaction in the world.” – 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Jean-Marie Lehn. This reaction involves sugars and amino acids to produce brown colored compounds and flavor compounds.
6. quantum theory.
Chemistry is a quantitative/predictive science. It is not an isolated collection of facts but a body of knowledge that fits together in laws and theories to describe nature. In this course, we will discuss these laws and theories that will allow us to predict chemical phenomena.
There are a lot of organic compounds (50 million and counting). 99% of all living organisms and >99% of all chemical compounds contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Organic Chemistry is the biggest, most studied field of chemistry. In this course, we will discuss organic reactivity concepts and develop skills in predicting products of reactions, explaining product formation with a reaction mechanism, and designing syntheses of organic compounds.
General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry courses consist of lecture and lab. Hands-on work and group work will be used to help you learn and understand chemistry. Your learning depends on you; you are responsible for your learning. This course is fast-paced and covers a lot of material. Furthermore, each successive topic builds upon previous topics. To maximize your learning of this material, study the assigned chapters and try working questions/problems at the end of each chapter prior to each class. This practice allows you to focus on important points in class discussions and ask questions over material you don’t understand. After each class, review your notes and the assigned chapter and try working more questions/problems.
What is the best way to learn Organic Chemistry? (And General Chemistry and your science classes?)
“You can’t memorize all the possible answers—you have to rely on intuition, generalizing from specific examples. This skill, far more than the details of every reaction, may actually be useful for medicine.” -- "How to Get an A- in Organic Chemistry", Barbara Moran, NY Times, 11/3/13 (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/education/edlife/how-to-get-an-a-in-organic-chemistry.html)