Friday, September 28, 2007

quiz results from week one assignment

So, I'm catching up on past stuff -- I'd had this great idea that I'd do my Chemistry homework before class in the mornings, as I get there early to beat some of the traffic, but wasn't able to get online, so hear I am on my dial-up connection at home. So, the quiz -- I got most of it right, except I was thinking that dissolving sugar in water was a chemical change because I was imagining the water molecules bonding with the sugar molecules, but when I saw the answer that it's a physical change because you can evaporate the water and get the sugar back, I thought, oh, well of course, what was I thinking? And the other one I got wrong was that I was thinking steel was a pure substance, when it is in fact a mixture of iron and carbon, and I thought well, I should have known that, because I come from a steel mill town, and if it were a pure substance it wouldn't have to be milled, now would it, and all those steel workers would have been out of a job even before the mills closed.

My favorite part of the website with the quiz was seeing that phenylethanol is the name of a chemical compound that gives a rose it's smell, and that phenylethylamine is the name of a chemical compound that our brains produce when we are in love and it is also found in chocolate. The two names are so similar I imagine there must be something chemically similar between them, and that makes me think that the rose being a symbol of love must have it's basis in chemistry! And that people started making that connection without any knowledge of chemistry, just by feeling the similarity somehow.

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