Life Without Purel
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What is a molecule?
Let’s pretend that you have a sugar cube
and a sledgehammer.
You wait until all the grownups leave the house—because you know that you’d get in a LOT of trouble if they saw you doing this—and you put the sugar cube in the middle of your kitchen table, then you take that sledgehammer, and you go WHAM! right on that sugar cube. Let’s also pretend that you haven’t destroyed your kitchen table by doing this.
Chances are that the sugar cube
has been smashed into little pieces. 
Each one of those pieces, or grains, is still sugar, though. It would still taste sweet. So, you set one grain of sugar in the middle of the table—or what remains of the table—and you take your sledgehammer and go WHAM! The grain of sugar is now a powder, a collection of even tinier grains. Again, it’s still sugar. Next you take one of those powder grains and do the same thing.
WHAM!
The pieces are so small, you can’t even see them without a magnifying glass. But they’re still there, and they’re still sugar. So you whip out your handy hand lens,
find one of those teeny little pieces, and do it again. WHAM! Now, the pieces are so small that you need a microscope to see them.
So you repeat. WHAM! And again. WHAM! And again WHAM! and again, and you keep doing this, and those poor sugar pieces just keep getting smaller and smaller.
A brief tangent: Here is an image of a typical sugar molecule:
Sugar is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and sometimes other atoms.
All molecules are made of atoms.
Anyway, back to our story. You keep smashing the sugar WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! (I love typing this) and the sugar just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Eventually you get to a point where the sugar grain cannot get any smaller. True, you can still smack it with the sledgehammer
again, (WHAM!)
but if you did that and broke it into smaller pieces, those pieces
would no longer be sugar. If you hit them hard enough, they would
probably break up into the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make
up sugar.That piece—the tiniest piece possible that is still sugar and not separate atoms—is a sugar molecule.
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about this page? Email: gsimonelli@leffellschool.org
Last Updated:
March 22, 2020