Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

Chapter 5. Mastering Laboratory Skills

This chapter describes and illustrates the laboratory skills that you need to master to complete the laboratory sessions in this book.

Measurement Resolution and Significant Figures

Measurements are a key part of chemistry, so it’s important to understand them and their limitations. Some measurements, called counts, are exact. For example, if you have a bag of apples, you can count the apples and state definitively that the bag contains exactly eight apples. But most measurements are inexact. For example, although the label on a bag of rice may state that it contains two kilograms of rice, this is only an approximation ...