Chemistry
Chemistry in everyday life
Baking, rusting, washing: chemical reactions happen around you all the time, often without you noticing.
What you need first
You don't need a lab for chemistry. When your toast browns in the morning, your bike rusts in the rain, or a candle burns in the evening, chemical reactions are happening right in front of you. Once you learn to spot them, you see your everyday life with completely different eyes.
Reactions everywhere
In a chemical reaction, starting substances turn into new substances with new properties. A candle flame turns wax and oxygen into CO₂ and water vapour. Plants do it the other way round: in they use light energy to build sugar and oxygen from CO₂ and water. And when you bake, several reactions at once create the browning, the smell and the taste.
Baking powder and rust
Baking powder makes dough rise because the gas CO₂ is produced when it is heated. The tiny gas bubbles puff up the dough like lots of little balloons. Rusting, on the other hand, takes its time: iron reacts with oxygen and water over weeks and months to form rust. This slow oxidation is the same kind of reaction as a burning candle, just in slow motion and without a flame.
Soap, limescale and your responsibility
Chemistry helps with cleaning too: soap bonds with grease and water at the same time and flushes the dirt away. Hard water contains a lot of dissolved lime. When it evaporates, the lime stays behind as a white crust, which you can dissolve with a mild acid like vinegar. One important thing: chemistry is neither good nor evil. The same science gives us medicines and fertilisers, but also pollutants. It all depends on how we handle it.
Exercises
0 of 6 solvedTime to try it yourself. You can't break anything, every attempt counts.
Which process is a chemical reaction?
Which gas makes cake dough rise when baking powder is heated?
What does iron need in order to rust?
Match each everyday process to what happens chemically.
In photosynthesis, sugar and oxygen are made from CO₂ and water. How many different starting substances go into this reaction? Light energy is not a substance and does not count.
Soap cleans because it bonds with … at the same time and so flushes the dirt away.
Where this leads