Question: What Is the Importance of Chemistry?

Answer: Why would you want to learn about chemistry? Chemistry is the study of matter and its interactions with other matter and energy. Here's a look at the importance of chemistry and why you should study it.

Chemistry has a reputation for being a complicated and boring science, but for the most part, that reputation is undeserved. Fireworks and explosions are based on chemistry, so it's definitely not a boring science. If you take classes in chemistry, you'll apply math and logic, which can make studying chemistry a challenge if you are weak in those areas. However, anyone can understand the basics of how things work... and that's the study of chemistry. In a nutshell, the importance of chemistry is that it explains the world around you.

Chemistry Explains...

· Cooking
Chemistry explains how food changes as you cook it, how it rots, how to preserve food, how your body uses the food you eat, and how ingredients interact to make food.

· Cleaning
Part of the importance of chemistry is it explains how cleaning works. You use chemistry to help decide what cleaner is best for dishes, laundry, yourself, and your home. You use chemistry when you use bleaches and disinfectants and even ordinary soap and water. How do they work? That's chemistry!

· Medicine
You need to understand basic chemistry so you can understand how vitamins, supplements, and drugs can help or harm you. Part of the importance of chemistry lies in developing and testing new medical treatments and medicines.

· Environmental Issues

Chemistry is at the heart of environmental issues. What makes one chemical a nutrient and another chemical a pollutant? How can you clean up the environment? What processes can produce the things you need without harming the environment?

We're all chemists. We use chemicals every day and perform chemical reactions without thinking much about them. Chemistry is important because everything you do is chemistry! Even your body is made of chemicals. Chemical reactions occur when you breathe, eat, or just sit there reading. All matter is made of chemicals, so the importance of chemistry is that it's the study of everything.

Importance of Taking Chemistry

Everyone can and should understand basic chemistry, but it may be important to take a course in chemistry or even make a career out of it. It's important to understand chemistry if you are studying any of the sciences because all of the sciences involve matter and the interactions between types of matter. Students wanting to become doctors, nurses, physicists, nutritionists, geologists, pharmacists, and (of course) chemists all study chemistry. You might want to make a career of chemistry because chemistry-related jobs are plentiful and high-paying. The importance of chemistry won't be diminished over time, so it will remain a promising career path

Chemistry Is Everywhere

Everything you hear, see, smell, taste, and touch involves chemistry and chemicals (matter). And hearing, seeing, tasting, and touching all involve intricate series of chemical reactions and interactions in your body. With such an enormous range of topics, it is essential to know about chemistry at some level to understand the world around us.

In more formal terms chemistry is the study of matter and the changes it can undergo. Chemists sometimes refer to matter as ‘stuff’, and indeed so it is. Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. Which is to say, anything you can touch or hold. Common usage might have us believe that ‘chemicals’ are just those substances in laboratories or something that is not a natural substance. Far from it, chemists believe that everything is made of chemicals.

Although there are countless types of matter all around us, this complexity is composed of various combinations of some 100 chemical elements. The names of some of these elements will be familiar to almost everyone. Elements such as hydrogen, chlorine, silver, and copper are part of our everyday knowledge. Far fewer people have heard of selenium or rubidium or hassium.

Nevertheless, all matter is composed of various combinations of these basic elements. The wonder of chemistry is that when these basic particles are combined, they make something new and unique. Consider the element sodium. It is a soft, silvery metal. It reacts violently with water, giving off hydrogen gas and enough heat to make the hydrogen explode. Nasty ‘stuff’. Also consider chlorine, a green gas when at room temperature. It is very caustic and choking, and is nasty enough that it was used as a horrible chemical gas weapon in the last century. So what kind of horrible mess is produced when sodium and chlorine are combined? Nothing more than sodium chloride, common table salt. Table salt does not explode in water or choke us; rather, it is a common additive for foods we eat everyday.

And so it is with chemistry, understanding the basic properties of matter and learning how to predict and explain how they change when they react to form new substances is what chemistry and chemists are all about.

Chemistry is not limited to beakers and laboratories. It is all around us, and the better we know chemistry, the better we know our world.

Question: Can We Drink Distilled Water?

A. What Is Distilled Water?

Distilled water is any water that has been purified using distillation. There are multiple types of distillation, but all of them depend on separating components of a mixture based on their different boiling points. In a nutshell, water is heated to its boiling point. Chemicals that boil off at a lower temperature are collected and discarded; substances that remain in a container after the water evaporates also are discarded. The water that is collected thus has a higher purity than the initial liquid.

B. Can We Drink Distilled Water?

Usually, the answer is yes. If drinking water is purified using distillation, the resulting water is cleaner and more pure than before. The water is safe to drink. The disadvantage to drinking this water is that most of the natural minerals in the water are gone. If these minerals are desirable (e.g., calcium, magnesium, iron), the distilled water might be considered inferior to mineral water or spring water. On the other hand, if the initial water contained trace amounts of toxic organic compounds or heavy metals, you might want to drink distilled water rather than the source water.

Generally, distilled water that you would find at a grocery store was made from drinking water, so it is fine to drink. However, distilled water from other sources may not be safe to drink. For example, if you take water from an industrial source that would not be safe to drink and then distill it, the distilled water may still contain enough impurities that it is unsafe for human consumption.

Another situation that could lead to impure distilled water results from using contaminated equipment. Contaminants could leach out of the glassware or tubing at any point of the distillation process, introducing unwanted chemicals. This is not a concern for commercial distillation of drinking water, but it could apply to home distillation . Also, there may be unwanted chemicals in the container used to collect the water. Plastic monomers or leaching from glass are a concern for any form of bottled water.