Hey everyone. In our journey to understand chemistry, it's first important to define what chemistry is. Now chemistry is the study of matter and the changes it undergoes with the atom being its basic functional unit. Now matter itself is anything that occupies space and has mass. And when it comes to matter, we can group it under three types.
We're going to say the first one is the simplest type of matter that is composed of one kind of atom. That would be our elements. OK, Now we're going to say an element. You might have heard of it if you've taken chemistry before, You might have heard of the periodic table of elements. We'll go into that in greater detail later on. But just realize that when we're talking about an atom, we're oftentimes referring to those elements on the periodic table.
Next, we have matter composed of two or more different elements that are chemically bonded together. So here we're talking about two or more elements. That means we're talking about compounds. So a compound is when you have two or more elements connected together chemically.
Then finally we have matter that is composed of elements and Oregon compounds that are physically mixed together, the keyword here being mixed O here. This would be our mixtures. So our mixture would be the third type of matter. Now that we've grouped matter into these three types, let's continue onward and further talk about these groupings.