Classification of matter according to Chemistry

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 advantage 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 books 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 memorizing where a specific shirt may have been placed.

A good classification scheme will allow you to memorize the characteristics 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 millions of organisms, a biologist will memorize the characteristics of different 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 manmade, which means that we make up the categories and classes. The classification 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 in the above graphic, 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 right now. Although the diagram is concise, it may not be completely clear unless we read about all of the categories in more detail. Once you understand the categories, the chart should be all that you need to review.

Matter is anything that is made up of atoms, and because all atoms have mass and volume, so does all matter. Even colorless gases, which you can’t see, contain atoms that have both mass and volume. If you doubt that invisible air has volume, blow up a balloon and see how much space the air takes up. All objects that you encounter in your day are examples of matter.

A substance is a type of matter that has a consistent composition. What I mean is that no matter where you find a specific substance, its composition will be the same. In other words, a molecule of water from India has the same composition as a molecule of water from Canada. There is no real variation in the composition of a substance (except, perhaps, on the subatomic level). There are two major types of substances: elements and compounds.