Newspaper articles

Introduction

It may seem strange to include ‘Newspaper articles’ as a heading under resources as they literally change daily. But that is exactly the point. Although a few newspapers such as The Financial Times and the New York Times have fairly wide international coverage most are localised in a particular country or indeed limited to a small region within a country. Some put their material on websites most of which are currently free[1] but this may change if Rupert Murdoch gets his way in the future. The point is that in every newspaper there are always references to Chemistry. For example there is an article in the Guardian about how global warming may have slowed down due to a fall in the amount of water in the upper atmosphere – which underlines the importance of water as a greenhouse gas. How often do you read articles where the chemistry is tantalisingly missing – a street has been closed because of the release of a poisonous gas but the identity of the gas is missing – a dye has been banned because it is potentially carcinogenic but the structure is missing etc. etc? Chemistry is a living subject. Because we have text books there is a tendency to forget this when we teach high school students ‘a fixed body of knowledge’. By using newspaper articles we can make the theoretical chemistry we need to teach come alive and relevant. This is particularly true for the material on the options. With Internet access in every classroom it can be instructive to allow students to spend some time researching articles from newspapers and then asking them to give small presentations to the rest of the class. Some sites that are usually worth visiting include:

Although I will put some selective articles with a discussion on my blog it is generally up to you to find your own newspaper resources – if the newspaper is not online then simply scan the article and put it on the internal server. I enclose one of my favourite examples below to illustrate the point.

Example of a newspaper article

This article was written by Roger Dobson and Peter Richards and is taken from 'The Independent on Sunday' dated 5 March 2006.

I like the above example (even though it is a few years old now) because it is very rare for a newspaper to include the chemical structure of a compound. It somehow seems rather unlikely that there is a drug which can prevent shopping but the structure is well worth exploring. It can be used to identify different functional groups and to illustrate hybridization, bond angles and ring strain. Because it is administered in the form of a substituted ammonium salt it also fits in well as another example of the material covered in salt formation under Novel uses for the IB data booklet.

Footnotes

  1. ^ The Times and the Financial Times newspapers from the UK now charge users to access their news online
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