Polymers, Plastics, Synthetic Fibres, Soaps and Detergents — The Chemistry of Everyday Materials

Look at three ordinary things and ask why they behave as they do.

An electrical switch is plastic, yet it does not soften when the wiring behind it warms up, while a plastic bucket left in the sun goes soft at the rim. A nylon rope holds a load that a cotton rope of the same thickness would not. A soap that lathers beautifully at home refuses to lather at all in a village well's water and leaves a grey deposit instead.

Each of those has a precise chemical reason, and each reason is worth a mark in a general awareness paper.

This is the most frequently examined chemistry in the whole of general studies, and the least demanding. There are no equations to balance and no calculations. What there is instead is a small vocabulary — polymer, monomer, thermoplastic, thermosetting, saponification, micelle — attached to materials you have handled since childhood.

Learn the reason behind each object rather than the object itself, and the questions answer themselves.

1. Which of the following is a thermosetting plastic?

2. The small repeating unit from which a polymer is built is called a:

3. Chemically, soap is the:

4. Soap does not lather well in hard water because:

5. Which of the following was the first fully synthetic fibre?

6. The process of heating natural rubber with sulphur to make it harder and more elastic is called:

7. The reaction in which a fat or oil is heated with an alkali to produce soap is called:

8. Teflon, used as the non-stick coating on cookware, is a polymer of: