10.5: Understanding the Periodic Table

As we mentioned in the previous section, the periodic table organizes elements based on their chemical and physical properties. The similarities exist in the groups of the periodic table, and those similarities are repeated along the periods. If you look at the periodic table below, you will notice similar colors in vertical chunks. These correspond to places where there are very similar chemical properties. We will explore these properties in a bit more detail in one of the subsections of this chapter. You might also notice that there are some color schemes that do not exactly match up with vertical chunks. There are a few reasons for this, that will be explored somewhat, but not in a great deal of detail. (The short answer is that there is greater complexity with the internal workings of some elements that gives rise to what might be viewed as exceptions.) Some of these differences are due to trends in physical properties, which have more complex origins than chemical properties. We will not get into the reasoning for that in this chapter, but we will also discuss those differences in physical properties briefly in the first subsection.

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