Alpha, beta and gamma compared, the group displacement law and decay equations, half-life arithmetic, fission against fusion, the medical and industrial radioisotopes, and carbon dating.
Unit 1 carries 17 of the 50 chemistry marks; with fourteen chapters sharing them, this one averages a little over one (MEC publishes weights by unit, not by chapter). It is the cheapest chapter in the unit to prepare, because the arithmetic is the first-order arithmetic you already met in Chemical kinetics and the rest is a short list of isotopes and their uses.
The MEC scope line runs: Radioactivity; types of nuclear reactions; radioisotopes; radiocarbon dating. The headings below are its points, in MEC's order.
This chapter overlaps Physics unit 6, radioactivity, and the two syllabuses divide the work. The chemistry side — the decay types, balancing nuclear equations, the group displacement law, half-life arithmetic, the isotopes and what they are used for, and dating — is here. The mass defect, binding energy per nucleon and the E = mc² calculations belong to the physics paper and are not repeated here; read them there rather than twice.
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See the plansMole Concept & Stoichiometry Made Simple
Avogadro's number, molar mass, molarity and the calculations that show up every year.
Basic Concepts in Chemistry: Masses, Radicals and Formulae
The vocabulary every other chemistry chapter assumes: valency, the carbon-12 mass scale, the radical charges you must know cold, and the two routines that turn a percentage into a formula.
Stoichiometry: The Mole, the Limiting Reagent and Ten Numericals
Dalton's postulates and where they fail, the five laws of combination, Avogadro's law and its uses, and every mole calculation the paper can ask, worked step by step.
Atomic Structure: From Bohr's Orbit to the Quantum Orbital
Rutherford's nucleus and why it could not survive, Bohr's three formulae, the hydrogen spectrum, de Broglie and Heisenberg, and the four quantum numbers that build every configuration.