Units 5 through 9 of AP Chemistry — kinetics, equilibrium, acids and bases, buffers, thermodynamics — worked through in 260 problems and about nine hundred ICE tables.

It covers a quarter of the syllabus in the space most books give the whole thing. That is the point. This is the quarter that decides grades.

Why so many ICE tables

Because setting one up correctly is a motor skill, not an insight. Students who have built forty of them stop making sign errors; students who have built four do not. The book gives you the practice volume that a class period cannot.

Inside

• Kinetics: 48 problems, including twenty determined from initial-rate data

• Equilibrium: 62 problems, with the approximation used, checked and — twice — deliberately failing

• Acids and bases: 54 problems across all four titration combinations

• Buffers: 30 problems plus twelve full titration curves to sketch and annotate

• Solubility: 24 problems, mostly common-ion

• Thermodynamics: 42 problems, ending with the ones that connect free energy back to K

The blank-curve section

Twenty-four printed grids with axes and no data, for sketching titration curves by hand until the shape is something you own rather than something you recognise. It is the most-used section in the book, judging by the copies students bring to class.

244 pages, lay-flat binding, uncoated paper. Designed to be written in — please write in it.