The easiest way to explain mixtures in chemistry is to talk about food.

Think about mixtures in terms of cooking, and there isn’t much I need to tell you. A salad, like the one pictured above, is a mixture. So is chicken noodle soup. So is…hmm, so is lemonade.

I told you we’d be talking about lemonade soon.

Even air is a mixture—of different gases. Believe it or not, we don’t just breathe in oxygen. In fact, if we breathed in pure oxygen, it would be poisonous. We inhale a little bit of nitrogen, too.

A mixture is—by textbook definition—a physical blend of two or more substances.

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