--- title: What is everything made of? — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «What is everything made of?», a lesson of the chemistry course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Cut a slice of cheese in half, then in half again, and again: the pieces get smaller, but you cannot go on forever. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Chemistry](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/) / What is everything made of? # What is everything made of? Lesson 1 of the chemistry course of Mova's primary school: 21 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/0/) — Cut a slice of cheese in half, then in half again, and again: the pieces get smaller, but you cannot go on forever. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/1/) — In the end everything (cheese, water, air, your own hand) is built from tiny pieces called atoms, far too small to see even with a school microscope. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/2/) — Atoms and the particles they make are never still: they jiggle, bump and drift, which is why Mum's perfume reaches your nose from across the room without anybody waving it. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/3/) — Atoms are not destroyed when ice melts or a smell spreads; the same atoms just move about and change partners. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/4/) — Nobody has seen an atom with bare eyes, but careful experiments over two hundred years showed they are real, and special microscopes can now map single atoms. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/5/) — Everything around us is made of tiny particles called atoms. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/6/) — A single hair is hundreds of thousands of atoms wide. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/7/) — Even one pencil dot holds more atoms than the number of people who have ever lived. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/8/) — Pencil "lead" is graphite, a kind of carbon, mixed with clay; it contains no lead metal. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/9/) — Particles in air and water are always moving and bumping, so smells and colours spread out on their own. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/10/) — Particles move faster when they are warmer, so things spread faster in heat and slower in cold. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/11/) — A salt grain is a tiny cube because salt's particles stack in a cube pattern; a sugar grain has flat faces too, but a different shape. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/12/) — Most atoms in your body, such as carbon, oxygen and iron, were made inside stars long ago; hydrogen is even older, from almost the beginning of the universe. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/13/) — An atom is made of smaller parts: protons and neutrons in a tiny middle called the nucleus, and electrons around it. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/14/) — Electrons have a negative charge and protons a positive one; opposite charges attract, and charges that are the same push each other apart. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/15/) — Your hand does not sink into a table because the electrons in your hand and in the table push each other away. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/16/) — Rubbing a balloon on a jumper moves electrons onto the balloon, so it becomes charged and can cling to a wall; on a damp day the water in the air lets the charge leak away, so the trick works badly. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/17/) — Your body is built from the atoms in the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/18/) — When ice melts, the same water molecules (a molecule = a small group of atoms joined together) are there before and after; melted ice weighs the same as the ice did. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/19/) — Ancient Greek thinkers guessed at four elements (earth, air, fire and water); Democritus guessed at uncuttable bits he called atoms («atom» comes from the Greek for «cannot be cut»), but only later experiments showed atoms are real. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/1-what-is-everything-made-of/20/) — Today we know of over a hundred kinds of atom. - next →: [Elements and the famous members of the periodic table](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/2-elements-and-the-periodic-table/) - ↑ back to [Chemistry](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/chemistry/)