The nature, occurrence and analysis of water pollutants is interesting chemically and relates well to the interdisciplinary nature of the modern chemistry curriculum. The issue is of worldwide significance and affects both wealthy and poor nations. In the first part of this paper we present an overview of water pollution in the United States and Mexico, including sources, federal regulations and standards, and standard methods for the assessment of overall water quality. The second part of the paper focuses on three water pollutants, lead, atrazine, and nitrate. We chose these as important representative examples of heavy metals, organic herbicides and inorganic pollutants. In addition to a background discussion of each substance and analysis methods for it, we describe laboratory activities that are suitable for the high school audience.
Nitrate and nitrite measurements are common tests used to examine drinking water quality. In this report we describe an undergraduate laboratory experiment based on capillary electrophoresis (CE) for the simultaneous analysis of nitrate and nitrite in water samples. This method may be used for analyzing a wide variety of water samples and can serve as a laboratory component in either environmental chemistry or instrumental analysis.
In this age of rapidly changing video images, MTV, and fast-moving commercials, both the high school and college educator, as never before, require tools that capture attention, instill curiosity, arouse questioning, and generate new challenges for students. Teachers who have incorporated ideas from NASA and the space program into their chemistry lessons have noted that students enjoy learning about material regarding, for example, the chemistry of the space shuttle. Discussion of the propulsion system on the shuttle not only raises technical questions but also, if the discussion is properly directed, ties chemistry to many social and economic issues.We will show, for example, how the reactions that describe the combustion of the shuttle's solid rocket fuel teach students about stoichiometry, thermodynamics, and acid-base chemistry and force them to address a host of environmental concerns.
A method is presented for treating kinetic data for systems in which first-order and second-order reactions proceed in parallel. Both the first-and second-order rate constants and absorbance at time f = 0 are calculated from absorbance vs.
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