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That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is r

by wahern 6y ago

That's not a more accurate representation than "burning carbon". The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. My middle school biology class would have been in the early 1990s when many of the finer details of cellular respiration weren't in any textbooks (certainly not middle school). It wasn't until 1996 that a critical step in ATP synthase was confirmed. But you don't need to know anything about ATP to understand the basic role of carbon in energy extraction and respiration. Actually, now that I think about it biology classes tended to focus more on photosynthesis, which sort of makes sense historically--I suppose breaking CO2 photosynthetically was for hundreds of years the far more scientifically intriguing question, and perhaps that's why it was emphasized so heavily in primary and secondary school biology.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. I would guess that there are two familiar forms of combustion in day-to-day life: burning wood, and burning gasoline. Only the second is referred to as "combustion" in the vernacular. (Since it happens in an "internal combustion engine".) Neither involves burning pure carbon; one burns carbohydrates and one burns petroleum. The definition of "combustion" that I was taught in chemistry class was "any reaction that produces carbon dioxide and water". But you might have a very different day-to-day life and chemistry education, I guess.

by wahern 6y ago

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> The specifics are irrelevant and can sometimes even obscure basic relationships. The point is recognizing the relationship to more familiar forms of combustion and oxidation in day-to-day life; that's how you orient yourself when you come to the question for the first time. I would guess that there are two familiar forms of combustion in day-to-day life: burning wood, and burning gasoline. Only the second is referred to as "combustion" in the vernacular. (Since it happens in an "internal combustion engine".) Neither involves burning pure carbon; one burns carbohydrates and one burns petroleum. The definition of "combustion" that I was taught in chemistry class was "any reaction that produces carbon dioxide and water". But you might have a very different day-to-day life and chemistry education, I guess.