Chemistry: Human Activity, Chemical Reactivity

by Peter G. Mahaffy, Roy Tasker, Bob Bucat

Taking an evidence-first big picture approach, Human Activity, Chemical Reactivity encourages students to think like a chemist, develop critical understanding of what chemistry is, why it is important and how chemists arrive at their discoveries. Flipping the traditional model of presenting facts and building to applications, this text begins with contexts that are real-life and matter to students - from doping in sports, to the chemistry behind the treads of wall-climbing robots. Informed by the latest chemical education research, Human Activity, Chemical Reactivity presents chemistry as the exciting, developing human activity that it is, rather than a body of facts, theories, and skills handed down from the past. Along with the innovative MindTap Reader and OWLv2 learning platform, this text uses unique case studies and critically acclaimed interactive e-resources to help students learn chemistry and how it is helping to address global challenges of the 21st century.

Genres: Textbooks

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Chris Fellows · Rating 1 out of 5]

An 'international edition' should not spell aluminium and caesium (and haemoglobin) like the rebel colonists do. And a textbook shouldn't be sold to us as having lots of interactive online bells and whistles if those bells and whistles are things students have to pay extra for.
Unfortunately we changed textbooks while I was on long service leave and unable to carry out my usual role of cranky-old-man-who-refuses-to-change-anything. I've just started writing my lectures for chapters 8 to 10 and am not terribly impressed so far.

Main errors I have found so far in chapter 8:

p.259, Table 8.1. This table should be labelled “Normal Melting Points and Boiling Points”, because the melting point and boiling point of substances depend on pressure. Helium does not have a melting point at atmospheric pressure.

p.269 (and elsewhere –most egregiously on p. 273). They keep calling the Balmer Equation the ‘Rydberg Equation’ and never quote the correct form of the Rydberg Equation, making it difficult for students to do many of the review questions in section 8.3.

p. 274, Figure 8.14. I think this figure is trying to express a bit of the messiness of real experiments, but it is just confusing, in that the orange line showing current should not be above the x-axis, and it should definitely not be sloping up before it reaches the critical frequency. Current should be a step function within the error of the experiment. Sitting eating dinner, you don’t experience a low continuous current out of your fork as it is hit by sunlight.

p. 276. The version of the Schrödinger equation given is wrong. It should be ħ , not h; the potential energy term is missing Ψ; and the form of the potential energy operator is only valid if Hartree atomic units are being used, which haven’t been introduced anywhere. I object pedagogically to showing an equation when it is only there to scare students, when I think this subject can be taught in a non-scary way. All it does in its current form is reinforce the idea that quantum mechanics is too hard.

p.281. Figure 8.20 encourages an erroneous understanding of isodensity surfaces because there are no blue dots outside the line in Figure 8.20(a).

pp.290-291. The expression for effective nuclear charge given on p. 290 does not produce the values given in Table 8.11, which in turn differ (though to a much lesser degree) from the values given by the correct form of the Slater formula.

[Mskittenkaboodle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear and easy to follow.