First Thoughts on Atomic Structure & Radioactivity

While taking the pretest for this unit, I was extremely stumped by a majority of the questions. I have no idea what alpha and beta means in terms of chemistry or how to balance chemical reactions. The only concept I understood for the most part was half-life. It was easy to understand that half life is how long it takes for a chemical to retain half of its mass. However, it was difficult to calculate specific percentages of how much chemical is left after a certain amount of time based on its half-life. Overall, I am curious on what new concepts we will learn in this unit and how they can be related back to our first unit, Nomenclature. I am also interested in what labs we will doing in this unit and what they have to do with atomic structure.

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