MODULE GENERAL CHEMISTRY 1

Chapter 3: SCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENT

Lesson 1: ACCURACY AND PRECISION IN MEASUREMENT

At the end of this section, you should be able to:

 Illustrate the importance of measurement by determining density of solids and
liquids; and
 Differentiate precision and accuracy

ACCURACY

 The accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of measurements

of a quantity to its actual (true) value.
 Accuracy is the degree of veracity while in some contexts precision may mean the
degree of reproducibility.

PRECISION

 Also called reproducibility or repeatability

 Is the degree to which repeated measurements under unchanged conditions show
the same results.
 precision is sometimes stratified into:

 Repeatability — the variation arising when all efforts are made to keep conditions
constant by using the same instrument and operator, and repeating during a short
time period; and
 Reproducibility — the variation arising using the same measurement process
among different instruments and operators, and over longer time periods.

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ILLUSTRATION AND DIFFERENCE OF ACCURACY AND PRECISION

 The accuracy of a measurement is how close a result comes to the true value.
Determining the accuracy of a measurement usually requires calibration of the
analytical method with a known standard.

 Precision is the reproducibility of multiple measurements. It is usually described by

the standard deviation, standard error, or confidence interval. A separate document
defines these quantitative measures of precision.

 The accuracy of the measurement refers to how close the measured value is to the
true or accepted value. For example, if you used a balance to find the mass of a
known standard 100.00 g mass, and you got a reading of 78.55 g, your
measurement would not be very accurate. One important distinction between
accuracy and precision is that accuracy can be determined by only one
measurement, while precision can only be determined with multiple measurements.

 Precision refers to how close together a group of measurements actually are to each
other. Precision has nothing to do with the true or accepted value of a
measurement, so it is quite possible to be very precise and totally inaccurate. In
many cases, when precision is high and accuracy is low, the fault can lie with the
instrument. If a balance or a thermometer is not working correctly, they might
consistently give inaccurate answers, resulting in high precision and low accuracy.

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Lesson 2: SIGNIFICANT FIGURES IN MEASUREMENTS AND

CALCULATIONS

At the end of this section, you should be able to:

 Identify the number of significant figures in a measurement; and
 Apply the rules for significant figures in calculations

SCIENTIFIC NOTATION

 Also known as standard form or as exponential notation, is a way of writing

numbers that accommodates values too large or small to be conveniently written in
standard decimal notation.

 Scientific notation has a number of useful properties and is often favored by

scientists, mathematicians, doctors, and engineers, who work with such numbers.

 in scientific notation all numbers are written like this:

a x10b
 ("a times ten to the power of b"), where the exponent b is an integer, and the
coefficient a is any real number (but see normalized notation below), called the
significand or mantissa (though the term "mantissa" may cause confusion as it can
also refer to the fractional part of the common logarithm). If the number is negative
then a minus sign precedes a (as in ordinary decimal notation).

Examples:
Ordinary Decimal Notation Scientific Notation

300 3x102
4, 000 4x103
5, 720, 000, 000 5.72x109
0.0000000061 6.1x10 9

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SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

 represents the decimal place which determines the extent of rounding off to be
done.
 this is usually based on the degree of accuracy in measurement.

RULES FOR THE SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

1. ALL non-zero numbers (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) are ALWAYS significant.

2. ALL zeroes between non-zero numbers are ALWAYS significant.
3. ALL zeroes which are SIMULTANEOUSLY to the right of the
decimal point AND at the end of the number are ALWAYS
significant.
4. ALL zeroes which are to the left of a written decimal point and are

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in a number >= 10 are ALWAYS significant.

Examples: How many significant figures are present in the following numbers?

Number Significant Figures Rule(s)

48,923 5 1
3.967 4 1
900.06 5 1,2,4
0.0004 1 1,4
8.1000 5 1,3
501.040 6 1,2,3,4
3,000,000 1 1
10.0 3 1,3,4

MEASUREMENTS

 Measurement is the process or the result of determining the

magnitude of a quantity, such as length or mass, relative to a unit
of measurement, such as a meter or a kilogram.
 The word measurement stems, via the Middle French term mesure,
from Latin
mēnsūra, and the verb metiri.
 The science of measurement is also called the field of metrology.

SYSTEMS OF MEASUREMENTS

A. METRIC SYSTEM

 The metric system is an international decimalised system of

measurement, first adopted by France in 1791, that is the common
system of measuring units used by most of the world. It exists in several
variations, with different choices of fundamental units, though the choice
of base units does not affect its day-to-day use.
 A set of fundamental units is a set of units for physical quantities from
which every other unit can be generated.

FUNDAMENTAL QUANTITIES

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1. Length (meter)
2. Mass (kilogram)
3. Time (second)
4. Electric current (ampere)
5. Thermodynamic temperature (Kelvin)
6. Amount of substance (mole)
7. Luminous intensity (candela)

B. ENGLISH SYSTEM

 a system of weights and measures based on the foot and pound

and second and pint
 the English system was originally based on non-universal things
such as human body parts. An inch was the width of the thumb,
an acre the amount of land that could be plowed in a day.
 the United States is the only country where the English system of
measurement is still widely use.

BASIC AND DERIVED SI UNITS AND

CONVERSION FACTORS

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REFERENCES:
https://www.britannica.com/science/chemistry
https://www.britannica.com/science/measurement-system
https://xaktly.com/UnitConversion.html
General chemistry1 First edition, Luciana V. ilao, Betty M. Lontoc, Edwehna
Elinore S. Pderna – Gayon.
LINKS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IiHPKAvo7g&t=11s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2yuDvwYq5g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRe1mire4Gc