By Logan(刘逸阳) from 2301

It’s my pleasure to be here to give a speech under the topic of the role of Chemistry in our daily life. To start with, I would like to state that Chemistry is found in every corner of our everyday life. To make this clear, I’ll first give you some examples.

For instance, some commercial products that provide people with instant energy and nutrients are not edible in the first place, they require heating. But how? One solution, also quite a commonly used one, is to use the reaction between Calcium oxide and water, which is quite exothermic, so it produces a large amount of heat to meet the requirements. Also, being commercially available, Calcium are relatively cheap and this quickly predominates over other heating “agents”.

A seal e.g. is concerned with the erosion of supporting columns used in ancient building. Those supporting columns, made up of another calcium compound, CaCO₃, are rigid and long-lasting during the period in which they were made. However, they are now faced with a new challenge which is getting increasingly tricky and difficult to deal with -  Acid Rain. Due to increasing emission of toxic gases, they potentially turn into acids under a condition like SO₂ and NO₂, etc. These columns are gradually vanishing. The basic mechanism behind this is that CaCO₃ reverts rapidly with the acids, producing soluble salts and CO₂ as a gas being emitted.  Chemists are so clever that they’ve come up with an acceptable solution – they coat the surface of columns with BeCO₃ , which then reacts with SO₂ to form BeSO₄, which is even more insoluble. This slows down the erosion process.

So, those are just basic Chemistry of some real-life phenomenon and the application of some chemical principals to solve the problems. This means that having a good understanding of the chemical properties of substances, gives us better insights into how we can best solve real-life problems and make the world a better place.

At last, I hope that everyone here who have not yet found the right path to meet the right thing can find some interest in Chemistry through my speech. But if you are doing other stuff, that is of course OK. Please remember, the world is full of heroes, and you are getting mature, but keep knocking the door and find something you love for sure.