Chapter

What is chemistry?
Chemistry is part of all our lives. Chemists have done many things that
affect the way we live. Look at these pictures; all the objects you can see are
made out of mixtures of different materials. All these materials have been
made by chemists.
Figure 1.1
The Victoria Falls Bridge over the
Zambezi between Zimbabwe and
Zambia was built between 1905 and
1908. It is made from steel and the
builders used their knowledge of the
different properties of steel to design
and construct it.

Websites

Now go to www.heinemann.
co.uk/hotlinks, insert the express
code 6799P and click on Activity
1.1.

Figure 1.2
Can you imagine a world without
plastics? Many older people can
because all these materials were
invented by chemists in the last 60
years.

1
UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY
Downloaded from www.pearsonIS.com/HeinemannIGCSE
01-Chap 1-001-003.indd 1

6/10/08 08:54:40

Figure 1.3
Many chemicals are very useful to us.
All the items you can see here have
been dicovered by chemists in the last
100 years.

Figure 1.4
Fuels allow us to travel further and
faster than ever before. Petrol and
diesel were developed by chemists
from crude oil.

Here are some more ways that chemists have influenced the way we live.
When we are ill we use medicines developed by chemists to help us get
better.
Chemists have helped to make food safe to eat.
Chemists have developed ways of making water clean and safe to drink
and of purifying sewage so that the water can be re-used.
Chemists have discovered and developed many different materials that
are part of our daily lives. Think of paints, glues, cleaning materials,
insecticides, fertilisers, and more.

2
UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY
Downloaded from www.pearsonIS.com/HeinemannIGCSE
01-Chap 1-001-003.indd 2

6/10/08 08:54:42

What is chemistry?

Chemists working with metals, called metallurgists, have developed all

the different kinds of metals we use in our daily lives and invented the
processes we use to extract them from their ores.
Chemists have invented all the different materials that modern buildings
are made from.
Chemists have invented explosives. These have been used to help us get
useful materials out of the ground but they have also been used to make
ammunition and bombs, which have killed or injured millions.
Chemists have even made artificial diamonds!
You can probably think of many more things that chemists have done that
affect your life.
Figures 1.5 and 1.6
Two famous chemists. Marie Curie
(left) was awarded two Nobel Prizes,
one for chemistry and one for physics,
for the work she did on radioactivity.
Dorothy Hodgkin (right) received
the1964 prize for using X-rays
to work out the structure of two
complex and important biological
molecules, insulin and vitamin B12.

Chemistry is the study of matter. Chemists try to find out the answer to
important questions like these:
What are substances made of?
Why do substances behave in the way they do?
How can we change one kind of matter into another?
Can we discover any patterns in the way some substances behave which
will allow us to predict how other substances might behave?
Chemists can then go on to ask useful questions like these:
How can we obtain useful materials from the earth and from living
things?
How can we make new substances that are useful to us?
This book will give you the answers to some of these questions. It will help
you understand chemistry and the benefits it brings us. It will also help
you to understand the problems that have been caused by chemistry, when
we destroy the natural environment in order to get the chemicals we need
and when we pollute air and water with waste chemicals we want to get
rid of.

DID YOU KNOW?

The chemist who invented
dynamite, an explosive used for
quarrying, was a Swede called
Alfred Nobel. The invention
earned him a large fortune.
In his will he left the money
(the equivalent of 100 million
dollars today) to the Swedish
Academy of Sciences to invest. He
instructed them to use the money
earned by the investment to give
prizes each year to scientists who
make major discoveries. These are
called the Nobel Prizes. Each prize
is now worth over a million US
dollars.

3
UNCORRECTED PROOF COPY
Downloaded from www.pearsonIS.com/HeinemannIGCSE
01-Chap 1-001-003.indd 3

6/10/08 08:54:44