The study of kinetics, the speed of chemical reactions, is essential to the study of chemistry and is a major topic in any Chemistry II class. Knowing the concepts of kinetics can help your understanding of why some reactions are fast and others slow and why some simple reactions are slow and other, more complex reactions are fast.
The reaction rate (the speed of reaction) is the change in the concentration of a reactant or product per the change in time. You can write it as:
Chemists normally measure concentration in terms of molarity, M, and time is usually expressed in seconds, s, which means that the units of the reaction rate are M/s. You can express the number of units in other ways such as:
