Chemistry: The Central Science in SI Units, Expanded Edition, Global Edition, 15th edition

Published by Pearson (October 7, 2021) © 2022

  • Theodore E. Brown Emeritus) University of Illinois
  • H Eugene LeMay University of Nevada, Reno
  • Bruce E. Bursten Worcester Polytechnic Institute
  • Catherine Murphy University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Patrick Woodward The Ohio State University
  • Matthew E. Stoltzfus The Ohio State University

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Title overview

For courses in two-semester general chemistry

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Unrivaled problem sets, notable scientific accuracy and currency, and remarkable clarity have made Chemistry: The Central Science the leading general chemistry text for more than a decade. Trusted, innovative, and calibrated, the text increases conceptual understanding and leads to greater student success in general chemistry by building on the expertise of the dynamic author team of leading researchers and award-winning teachers.

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Key features

  • Integrative Exercises connect concepts in the current chapter with those from previous chapters and serve as an overall review of key concepts, helping students gain a deeper understanding of how chemistry fits together.
  • Sample Integrative Exercises in many chapters show how to analyse and solve problems encompassing more than one concept.
  • Design An Experiment activities provide a departure from the usual end-of-chapter exercises with an inquiry-based, open-ended approach that stimulates a student to 'think like a scientist.' Designed to foster critical thinking, each exercise presents the student with a scenario in which various unknowns require investigation. The student is called upon to ponder how experiments might be set up to provide answers to particular questions about observations.
  • Chemistry and Life and Chemistry Put to Work help students connect chemistry to world events, scientific discoveries, and medical breakthroughs.
  • The unique Analyse - Plan - Solve - Check feature helps students to understand what they are being asked as they solve, plan how to solve it, work their way through the solution, and check their answers. Selected sample exercises use a dual-column problem-solving strategy approach to show students the thought process involved in each step of a mathematical calculation.
  • Data-Driven Problem Revisions were made in an informed manner with the author team consulting the reservoir of data available through Mastering Chemistry to revise the question bank. This data enabled them to analyse which problems were frequently assigned and why; to pay careful attention to the amount of time it took students to work through a problem (flagging those that took longer than expected); and to observe the wrong answer submissions and hints used (a measure used to calculate the difficulty of problems).
  • Practice Exercises provide students with an additional problem to test mastery of the concepts in the text and to address the most common conceptual misunderstandings. To ensure that the questions touched on the most common misconceptions, the authors consulted the ACS Chemistry Concept inventory before writing their questions.
  • Practice Exercises accompany each Sample Exercise within the chapters with correct answers provided in an appendix.
  • Visualising Concepts exercises precede the end-of-chapter exercises and ask students to consider concepts through the use of models, graphs, and other visual materials. These help students develop a conceptual understanding of the key ideas in the chapter. Additional conceptual exercises are found among the end-of-chapter exercises.
  • Molecular illustrations help students see what is happening on a molecular level in the sample exercises.
  • Multi-Focus Graphics provide a variety of perspectives including macroscopic, microscopic, and symbolic to portray various chemical concepts. Students develop a more complete understanding of the topic being presented. Computer-generated molecular illustrations provide visual representations of matter at the atomic level.
  • Go Figure questions let students stop and take time to analyse the artwork in the text to be sure they understand the concept behind it.

New to this edition

  • Eight chapters cover organic chemistry in depth, ranging from an overview of hydrocarbons to their advanced applications in modern industry as well as biological processes. An additional ninth chapter covers spectroscopy and gives the instructor the freedom to discuss technological details if it matches their pedagogical style.
  • Ready-to-Go Modules for the book include modules on specific organic-chemistry content presented in-depth for the first time. These provide ready-made content on select topics to help the instructor introduce a concept to their students.
  • Section-opening text and images enhance students' understanding of the concepts introduced in that section and explicate the historical contexts around key inventions and discoveries in chemistry.
  • End-of-section Exercises and Self-Assessment Exercises bring assessment closer to the key pedagogical takeaways from each section.
  • How To features offer step-by step guidance for solving specific types of problems such as Drawing Lewis Structures, Balancing Redox Equations, Naming Acids, etc. These features, with numbered steps wrapped by a thin rule, are integrated into the main discussion and are easy to find.
  • A Closer Look features have been updated to reflect recent news and discoveries in the field of chemistry, providing relevance and applications for students.
  • End-of-chapter questions often give students the chance to test whether they understood the concept or not.
  • Enhanced art creates clarity and provides a cleaner more modern look with details that include white-background annotation boxes with crisp, thin leaders plus richer and more saturated colours in the art, and expanded use of 3D renderings.
  • Annotations offer more detailed explanations; new leaders emphasise key relationships and key points in figures.
  • Before/after photos more clearly show characteristics of endothermic and exothermic reactions. Added reaction equations connect the chemistry to what's happening in the photos.

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Table of contents

  • Introduction: Matter, Energy, and Measurement
  • Atoms, Molecules, and Ions
  • Chemical Reactions and Reaction Stoichiometry
  • Reactions in Aqueous Solution
  • Thermochemistry
  • Electronic Structure of Atoms
  • Periodic Properties of the Elements
  • Basic Concepts of Chemical Bonding
  • Molecular Geometry and Bonding Theories
  • Gases
  • Liquids and Intermolecular Forces
  • Solids and Modern Materials
  • Properties of Solutions
  • Chemical Kinetics
  • Chemical Equilibrium
  • Acid-Base Equilibria
  • Additional Aspects of Aqueous Equilibria
  • Chemistry of the Environment
  • Chemical Thermodynamics
  • Electrochemistry
  • Nuclear Chemistry
  • Chemistry of the Nonmetals
  • Transition Metals and Coordination Chemistry
  • The Chemistry of Organic Compounds
  • Stereochemistry of Organic Compounds
  • Chemistry of Alkenes and Alkynes
  • Alcohols, Haloalkanes, and Ethers
  • Aldehydes, Ketones, and Carbohydrates
  • Carboxylic Acids and their Derivatives
  • Benzene and its Derivatives
  • Nitrogen-Containing Organic Compounds
  • Solving Molecular Structure

Author bios

THEODORE L. BROWN received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1956. Since then, he has been a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is now Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. He served as Vice Chancellor for Research, and Dean of The Graduate College, from 1980 to 1986, and as Founding Director of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology from 1987 to 1993. Professor Brown has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1972 he was awarded the American Chemical Society Award for Research in Inorganic Chemistry and received the American Chemical Society Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry in 1993. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Chemical Society.

H. EUGENE LEMAY, JR., received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Pacific Lutheran University (Washington) and his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1966 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He then joined the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is currently Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at the University College of Wales in Great Britain, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor LeMay is a popular and effective teacher, who has taught thousands of students during more than 40 years of university teaching. Known for the clarity of his lectures and his sense of humor, he has received several teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award (1991) and the first Regents' Teaching Award given by the State of Nevada Board of Regents (1997).

BRUCE E. BURSTEN received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1978. After two years as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas A&M University, he joined the faculty of The Ohio State University, where he rose to the rank of Distinguished University Professor. In 2005, he moved to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Bursten has been a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, and he is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society. At Ohio State he has received the University Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982and 1996, the Arts and Sciences Student Council Outstanding Teaching Award in 1984,and the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1990. He received the Spiers Memorial Prize and Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2003, and the Morley Medal of the Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society in 2005. He was President of the American Chemical Society for 2008. In addition to his teaching and service activities, Professor Bursten's research program focuses on compounds of the transition-metal and actinide elements.

CATHERINE J. MURPHY received two B.S. degrees, one in Chemistry and one in Biochemistry, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1986. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in1990. She was a National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1993. In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, becoming the Guy F. Lipscomb Professor of Chemistry in 2003. In 2009 she moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as the Peter C. and Gretchen Miller Markun as Professor of Chemistry. Professor Murphy has been honored for both research and teaching as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, a Cottrell Scholar of the Research Corporation, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner, and a subsequent NSF Award for Special Creativity. She has also received a USC Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award, the USC Golden Key Faculty Award for Creative Integration of Research and Undergraduate Teaching, the USC Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the USC Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. Since 2006, Professor Murphy has served as a Senior Editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry. In 2008 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Murphy's research program focuses on the synthesis and optical properties of inorganic nanomaterials, and on the local structure and dynamics of the DNA double helix.

PATRICK M. WOODWARD received B.S. degrees in both Chemistry and Engineering from Idaho State University in 1991. He received a M.S. degree in Materials Science and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Oregon State University in 1996. He spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In1998, he joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at The Ohio State University where he currently holds the rank of Professor. He has enjoyed visiting professorship sat the University of Bordeaux in France and the University of Sydney in Australia. Professor Woodward has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award winner. He currently serves as an Associate Editor to the Journal of Solid State Chemistry and as the director of the Ohio REEL program, an NSF-funded center that works to bring authentic research experiments into the laboratories of first- and second-year chemistry classes in 15 colleges and universities across the state of Ohio. Professor Woodward's research program focuses on understanding the links between bonding, structure, and properties of solid-state inorganic functional materials.

MATTHEW W. STOLTZFUS received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Millersville University in 2002 and his Ph. D. in Chemistry in2007from The Ohio State University. He spent two years as a teaching postdoctoral assistant for the Ohio REEL program, an NSF-funded center that works to bring authentic research experiments into the general chemistry lab curriculum in 15 colleges and universities across the state of Ohio. In 2009, he joined the faculty of Ohio State where he currently holds the position of Chemistry Lecturer. In addition to lecturing general chemistry, Stoltzfus accepted the Faculty Fellow position for the Digital First Initiative, inspiring instructors to offer engaging digital learning content to students through emerging technology. Through this initiative, he developed an iTunesU general chemistry course, which has attracted over 120,000 students from all over the world. Stoltzfus has received several teaching awards, including the inaugural Ohio State University2013 Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Lecturer and he is recognised as an Apple Distinguished Educator.

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