Yes, what even is a chemical?
In: Chemistry
Anything with a defined composition at the atomic level.
Water is a chemical – it is defined as H2O, i.e. an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, more or less bound together (liquid water likes to wiggle-jiggle around and pass hydrogens to each other and share them with anything dissolved in the water, but that basic unit of H2O is water).
Sand is *not* a chemical. There is no strict definition of what atoms are in sand; sand tends to contain a lot of different things.
But silica, the main ingredient of sand, *is* a chemical. It is SiO2, or one silicon atom and two oxygen atoms.
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