Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
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An Introduction to Chemistry:
The Science of Chemistry
Lesson 1-1: Classification of Matter
When a person is confronted with a large number of objects or ideas, it
is only natural to want to classify and organize them into groups. The ad-
vantage of grouping items is that you will end up with a smaller number of
groups than objects. In your day-to-day life, you may group baseball cards
according to teams or positions. You may organize your topics according
to titles or authors. At the very least, you probably have a sock drawer. Do
you organize your clothes into drawers, according to the type of item? This
allows you to remember where you keep your shirts, rather than memoriz-
ing where a specific shirt may have been placed.
A good classification scheme will allow you to memorize the charac-
teristics of the groups, which you can then apply to all of the objects in the
groups. In other words, rather than memorizing the characteristics of mil-
lions of organisms, a biologist will memorize the characteristics of the dif-
ferent kingdoms. If an organism is known to belong to a certain kingdom,
then the biologist will know some of the characteristics of the organism,
based on the known characteristics of the kingdom.
It is important to realize that these classification schemes are man-
made, which means that we make up the categories and classes. The classi-
fication schemes can change, if someone comes up with a system that
scientists like better than the present system. The present classification
scheme for chemistry will probably seem very simple and elegant to you,
especially if you have recently studied the classification system of biology.
As you can see from the graphic on page 14, all matter can be divided
up into four main categories. Of course, there are other ways to classify
matter, but this system is the one that seems to be generally recognized
