Oh Behave Like an Ideal Gas, Baby! The science of gases, atmosphere, and climate change and how we can use rational expressions or irrational thoughts to understand it all.

An Integrated, Interdisciplinary, Thematic, Standards-based Unit for chemistry/advanced algebra. Air and the atmosphere are all around us, impacting our daily lives. We harness the concepts of the kinetic molecular theory (Gas Laws) and atmospheric pressure for many aspects of work, life, and recreation: scuba diving, hot air balloons, airplane flight, compressed natural gas, etc. However, in addition to the natural composition of gases in the atmosphere, human activities that burn fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide, which in turn increases the greenhouse effect and leads to global climate change. This unit also demonstrates the importance of communicating scientific theories as mathematical expressions. In order to understand the nature of gases in the atmosphere it is imperative to be able to solve literal equations; write and graph direct, inverse and joint variation functions; and to perform operations on rational expressions.