Introduction

How would you go about classifying the ocean? What kind of material would it be?

Although classifying the ocean may not be a particularly useful thing to do, what would you come up with? Well, when you look at the ocean and everything that's in it, you'd have to classify it as a heterogeneous mixture, because of the things which are in it but not dissolved: the suspended silt and sand, the fish, the whales, the kelp and so forth. If you filter out all of these things and the other solids, what is left is a solution. Why a solution? A solution because it is homogeneous, but with various materials dissolved in it. If you evaporate away the water, a salt residue remains. Even though the filtered seawater is homogeneous, you can separate one component from the others.

Now take a look at the other pages in this section to get an overview of the purpose of this lesson and see where solutions fit into the general scheme of things by reviewing the classification scheme of materials from CH 104 and learning how solutions differ from other similar materials.

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