Chemistry in Our Lives
Abby Hackenberger
Chemistry 110
June 8th, 2015

Chemistry in Our Lives
As we all have discovered in this first week of class, chemistry is visible in all of our lives. After reviewing all of the information for this course, it is very apparent that none of us realized how much this is true. There are the obvious pieces of my career that were apparent to me such as administering medications at work as a nurse and understanding their pharmacokinetics, discussing treatments of patients in relation to their specific disease process, and knowledge of medical advancements through experimentation. As a nurse in any role, chemistry plays a significant role in the way we function and practice. But it is the small things in daily life that I didn’t recognize. The weather, the food we eat, how to we get to work every day, and even the biochemistry of our emotions are so easily overlooked. So to ask the question “how is chemistry important to you and society” is so easy to answer, a more difficult question: how isn’t it? When beginning to learn about how chemistry affects all of our lives, it is important to understand the different between accuracy and precision. Accuracy is the closeness between what we measure and what we believe to be true, while precision is the closeness to one another of repeated measurements gathered of a certain variable. Therefore, if a measurement is far from what we expect it to be, it is not accurate. If we obtain multiple measurements of a certain variable and the results are far from each other than these results are not precise. As we go through our daily lives, we depend on accuracy and precision to delegate our interactions and methods by which we function. The examples listed below are easy ways for us to illustrate the importance of both. When we buy a gallon of gasoline, a bushel of corn, or a liter of bottled water, do we premeasure these items before purchase? No, we trust the retail industry to sell us what we are paying for. If we get eight gallons of gas in our car, how do we know we are getting eight gallons? In society, we expect that the seller has methods in place to ensure that we are getting the exact amount of food, water, gas, etc. that we pay for. What if you filled up with gas only to make it ten miles down the road and run out? Businesses get a reputation by the accuracy and precision with which their products are made and sold. If it is poor, people don’t return and their business fails. If it is high quality, their business should thrive. Precision and accuracy really symbolize a system of checks and balances, in this example highlighting our economy. While accuracy and precision are important, they will not be achieved if we don’t know how to complete an experiment or observation to begin with. When discussing experimentation, we talk about the scientific method. This method is made up of multiple steps to ensure the outcomes are both as accurate and precise as possible. These steps include: Observation, formulation of a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis by experimentation, and the formulation of laws and theories. Scientists begin by gathering information and