iGCSE Edexcel Chemistry - States of Matter

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Hannah Ogahara explains States of Matter 

Here is The transcription...

Hi, I’m Hannah from Love Learning Tutors and I am here to help you with your chemistry and get you off to a great start. If you get stuck, please check out our videos and see if there is something to refer to. If it is not there, just let us know and comment. Say, “Hey guys, we really want to know this…”, and we’ll be happy to oblige. So to start off with, I’m going through the GCSE, iGCSE Edexcel Specification. The reason I use the spec is in theory, if you can do everything on the spec from top to bottom, you’ll know everything to pass your exams with flying colours and get those 9s.

To begin with, from the tip top, we’re going to start with states of matter. By states of matter, we’re talking about solids, liquids and gases. You might have seen these before, they’re really nice easy marks if you get the question.

Let me quickly explain, in solids the particles are very close and are in a regular pattern. In terms of movement they’re stuck, they can only vibrate in the position they are in.

Liquids, they are a little bit further apart, but still relatively close together. They are random, and they flow (they can move) unlike the solids. This is relatively slow.

Lastly we have gases. They are furthest apart, their movement is also random and they flow more quickly.

As you can imagine, you’ve probably seen with the water example with ice. To go from solid to liquid we need to increase the temperature and give the particles more energy. Solids have the least amount of energy, if we ice more energy (we heat it up), it becomes a liquid. If we give water more energy it will become water vapour, a gas. So with each step, the particles gain energy to turn into the next state.

You might expect to see state symbols in your equations and such. Get used to thinking, in their state, as I’ve seen them in the lab, what do they look like? For example Fe (iron) is a solid at room temperature, water is a liquid, and Oxygen is a gas. Don’t forget that most gases travel in pairs.