Nature of Matter: Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures

What a mixture is

Look around you and find out what a mixture is.

Look around: the stairs, the air you breathe, the water in your bottle, your lunch, your clothes and shoes, this book, the trees outside, your ball. All of it is matter, and all of it is made of tiny particles.

Most things are not made of just one substance. They are two or more substances mixed together.

Think of a plate of poha: in one spoonful you get flattened rice, onion, tomato, a peanut and some coriander. A sprout salad is the same. So are sugar dissolved in water, soups and lemonade.

When two or more substances are mixed and each one keeps its own properties, that is a mixture. The substances in it are its components, and they don't react chemically with each other.

Mixtures come in two kinds:

	Non-uniform	Uniform
can you see the components?	yes, with your eyes or a magnifying glass	no, not even with a microscope
how they are spread	unevenly	evenly, the same everywhere
examples	sprout salad (green gram, chickpeas, onion, tomato), poha	sugar in water

Make your own lists: which mixtures at home are uniform, and which are non-uniform?

In a mixture each component keeps its own properties and none of them react chemically; it is uniform if the components cannot be told apart, non-uniform if they can.

Uniform and non-uniform mixtures.

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