Learning Chemistry Key Math Skills

During your study of chemistry, you will work many problems that involve numbers. You will need various math skills and operations. We will review some of the key math skills that are particularly important for chemistry. As we move through the chapters, we will also reference the key math skills as they apply. 

For any number, we can identify the place value for each of the digits in that number. These place values have names such as the ones place (first place to the left of the decimal point) or the tens place (second place to the left of the decimal point). Let s look first at the place values for a number without a decimal point. 

Note that place values ending with the suffix ths refer to the decimal places to the right of the decimal point. 

Identify the place value for each of the digits in the number 825.10. 

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A new section, Learning Chemistry Key Math Skills, reviews basic math required in chemistry, such as place values, positive and negative numbers, percentages, solving equations, and interpreting a line graph. 

NEW Key Math Skills review basic math relevant to the chemistry you are learning throughout the text. A Key Math Skill Review at the end of each chapter summarizes and gives additional examples. 

Chapter 1, Chemistry in Our Lives, introduces the concepts of chemicals and chemistry, discusses the scientific method in everyday terms, guides students in developing a study plan for learning chanistry, and now has a new section of Key Math Skills, which reviews basic math needed for learning chemistry. The section on Writing Numbers in Scientific Notation was moved from Chapter 2 and is now part of the section of Key Math Skills in this chapter. 

Here we provide another actual midterm examination from the intense Summer P. Chem. course at VCU in 2008. If students are told they are responsible for derivations like the van der Waals critical point and the Camot cycle they will have a chance to learn them, but it is unlikely students will learn such derivations without fair warning. Since students can learn massive amounts of encyclopedic information in organic chemistry and biochemistry, there is no reason not to expect them to learn key multistep derivations. Learning these key derivations improves the level of the math skill in the class. 

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