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Matter and its Properties

Hello friends and welcome to a new Happy Learning video.

Look around you, all you can see, all that is around you is made up of matter. Water, animals or even a simple table are all made up of matter, but do you know what matter is? Matter is everything that has a mass and volume. These are matter´s general properties.

Mass is the amount of matter in a body. It is measured in kilogrames and can be calculated with the use of a balance or scales, yup, exactly like the ones you have in your bathroom at home or like the ones doctors use to weight us. Let’s give you an example so that you can understand it better, an elephant which weighs 4000 kilos has a lot more matter than a kangaroo which weighs only 25. That’s logical, isn’t it?

The volume is the space that a body takes up, and is measured in liters and so that you understand it better, we will continue with the same example of the elephant and kangaroo. The elephant occupies more space than the kangaroo, otherwise meaning that it´s volume is a lot greater. To calculate the volume of a object, for example, that of a stone, we must first fill a measuring jug with exactly a liter of water, just as we are seeing in this image. When we introduce the stone in the jug, we will see the water level rise and now it indicates 1,7 liters. Now we must subtract this new measurement to that of the liter of water which we had at the beginning meaning; 1,7 minus 1,0 and the result is the stones volume, as in this stones has a volume of 0,7 liters. Easy isn’t it? Truth is, to calculate the volume of an elephant, we would need a very large swimming pool.
Matter has specific characteristics such as its color, its taste, its hardness, its elasticity, its temperature or its density which allows us to differentiate one substance from another.

This means that each matter has its own properties. For example, milk is liquid and white in comparison to a pear which is sweet. There are very different from each other though both equally yummy. It’s easy to differentiate the substances in each matter, isn’t it?

Well now you know that everything is made up of matter and that they have general properties such as their mass and volume and specific properties such as color, taste, or density which is what allows us to distinguish one substance from another…

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