Prologue

One of the central lessons of chemistry is that the starting and ending points of a reaction don’t have much to do with the business in between. Your journey through AP chemistry is much the same. In the beginning, you decided to take AP chemistry. In the end, you’ll take the AP chemistry exam. These moments are fixed points on the horizon behind you and the horizon in front of you. Time will move you from one point to the other. What you make of the intervening landscape is mostly up to you. But along the way, we’d like to help.

The College Board is very clear about the chemistry concepts and problems it wants you to master. The clear guidelines provided by the College Board lie at the heart of this blog. We emphasize what the Board emphasizes, and we suspect that those are the very things that you’d like to emphasize as you prepare for the exam.

Chemistry is the practical science, which is one reason why a practical attitude permeates this blog. We also realize that you’re not simply reading this blog — you’re using it for a specific purpose. Your simple, clear goal: to ace the AP Chemistry exam. You want your grasp of chemistry to be just as clear as your goal for the AP exam. This blog is here to support your quest for chemistry clarity; think of it as window cleaner for your brain. (Window cleaner is largely an aqueous solution of ammonia, by the way.)

The structure of this blog largely follows the sequence you might follow in an AP chemistry course, so it lends itself to use as companion text as you go through the course. On the other hand, we have written the blog to be quite modular, so you can pick and choose the posting that interest you in any sequence. Cross-references are provided in any instances where there is must-know information discussed in another posting. You don’t have to read this thing cover to cover.