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Personal Narrative: Understanding Significant Figures In Chemistry

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At the beginning of the school year, I knew very little about chemistry. However, I believe that I now know various concepts that were taught in my chemistry class. There are many concepts that were taught throughout the year that I have liked, such as stoichiometry and understanding significant figures. There are also several concepts that I have not liked, such as mole-to-mass conversions for compounds and finding the ratio of diffusion rates. For the most part, the concepts that I enjoyed learning were the concepts that I understood quickly. One of the concepts that I liked the best in chemistry was stoichiometry. When I first started learning stoichiometry, I did not like it at all. I actually hated it. I hated it because I could not figure out how to solve the problems correctly. I was trying my hardest on the homework assignments, but I was still making bad grades. I did just not understand the process of how the problems were solved. I knew that I had to do something before the test or I was going to have a bad grade in the class. So, the night before the test, I went home with the intention of teaching myself how to do stoichiometry problems. After reading chapter 12 of my chemistry book, Chemistry Matter …show more content…

I found that the concept of understanding significant figures was fairly easy. Significant figures are digits that are used to express an accurate degree of measurement. They include all digits in a number except for all leading zeros (Dingrando, Tallman, Hainen, and Winstrom, 2005). Significant figures always include all nonzero digits (Dingrando, Tallman, Hainen, and Winstrom, 2005). So, understanding significant figures, a concept that I learned in my chemistry class, was a reasonably simple concept to understand. Therefore, significant figures was one of the subjects in chemistry that I enjoyed

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