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Electrical Properties Of Metals And Why These Properties Are Important

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Hello fellow physics student, in this summary I will be talking about Electrical Properties of Metals and why these properties are important. Civilization has used metals for many purposes: tools, weapons, boats, machinery, electronics, and many more. Society depends heavily on metals and without metals our world as we know it would be completely different than we know now. In this chapter we considered how we can describe how electrons act within different elements and materials. Before we can talk about how electrons act in elements it is important to go over how electrons act in an atom.
Now, many are familiar with the composition of an atom. An atom is composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons have a positive charge, a neutron has a neutral charge, and an electron has a negative charge. If an element has the same number of protons and electrons then the elements charge will be neutral. If an element has more protons then electrons then it will have a positive charge, and will try finding new electrons from somewhere, either by bonding or stripping electrons from other atoms. The number of protons indicates what element the atom is, for example let’s consider carbon. Carbon has the periodic number 6, which means that it has 6 protons, and normally an atom has the same number of neutrons as it does protons. Carbon has 4 valence electrons, which means that it has a positive 2 charge, and wants to find 2 electrons to fill in its outer shell. We know now that the

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