 Our first topic covers rates of reaction. Without doubt this is the central idea in chemical kinetics. There are three main aims of this topic, or three things that you should be able to do by the end of this segment of the lecture series. Firstly, you'll be able to state which factors influence the rate of reaction, but more importantly, you'll have to know how they influence it, and you'll need to consider this from the perspective of both macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of chemistry. For instance, we know that macroscopically an increase in temperature should increase the rate of reaction, but at the molecular scale it's really the speed of the molecules as they move that causes a reaction to speed up by giving them more collision energy and a higher probability of actually forming a reaction. And don't just think that more temperature means more faster is an adequate explanation, we'll need to see some way of quantifying this as well. Secondly, you'll be able to explain reaction orders and construct rate laws for each. At the end of the day, you can treat this as an exercise in memorization and just learn a few equations, but it helps to be able to drive them mathematically. It also absolutely helps if you know where they come from in terms of how molecules interact. After all, relating what happens at a molecular level to the equations that predict the observations we see in the lab is the very reason we have physical chemistry. Thirdly, and finally, you'll be able to use the initial rates and pseudo first order methods to calculate reaction orders and rate constants. These methods, despite their odd sounding names, are simpler than you might think. And we'll cover this in two different ways, by being able to plot a graph by hand and also since this is the 21st century using a spreadsheet and a computer to it. And we'll also cover how to simulate a reaction and solve a rate constant using an integrated rate law. These three objectives cover everything you need to know about rates of reaction as an undergraduate chemist. It might seem simple at first, but there's a lot buried in these topics.