There will be 2 lectures, each of 1½ hours duration per week (Tues. & Thus). Course location is Science 2, Room TBA.

Grades will be based on performance in 2 regular examinations plus a comprehensive final examination as follow:

CHEM 482C CHEM 582C

Exam 1 20% 20%

Exam II 20% 20%

Final Exam 30% 20%

Oral presentation 10% 10%

Problems/Quizzes 20% 10%

Term paper none 20%

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Total 100% 100%

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Up to 5% adjustment of final point accumulation may be assessed based on instructor observation during class and activity periods. Failure to participate in a scheduled examination will result in a grade of zero. Weekly problem sets will be assigned for a given lecture topic, which may be collected for grading. The problem sets will be posted to the web-address shown above and will only become assessable after a given lecture topic.

Inductive-cooperative learning is a prospective approach to be pursued as part of this course. The objective is to instill creative-problem solving skills, and to relate the concepts of chemistry principles to real-life situations. The approach involves searching from literature for real-life problems. Lectures will be used to convey both the approach and the techniques. Students will be grouped into sub-teams and each team is required to diagnose these problems in a team setting during class and provide answers. A typical problem solving class exercise will require analytical, evaluative, or creative thinking.

Environmental Chemistry deals with those aspects of our environment that can be clarified by understanding the basic physical and chemical principles involved. It may involve a study of Freon reactions in the stratosphere, or an analysis of toxic kepone deposits in ocean sediments. It also covers the basic chemistry of toxic trace element species synthesized during the manufacture of synthetic natural gas from coal. Environmental chemistry may be defined as the study of the sources, reactions, transport, effects, and fates of chemical species in the water, soil, and our environments, as well as the influence of human activity upon these processes. Thus it is the science of chemical phenomena in the environment.

One of environmental chemistry's major challenges is the determination of the nature and quantity of specific pollutants in the environment. Thus, chemical analysis is a vital step in environmental research. The difficulty of analyzing for many environmental pollutants can be awesome. Environmentally significant levels of some pollutants may be only a few parts per trillion. Hence, the analytical chemistry required to understand some environmental systems requires a very low limit of detection. However, environmental chemistry is not the same as analytical chemistry. Analytical is only one of the many sub-disciplines that must be involved in the study of the chemistry of the environment.