This chapter describes oxidation and reduction as the transfer of electrons from a reducing agent to an oxidizing agent. It explains the use of oxidation numbers to identify redox reactions, and presents two methods for balancing equations.

In this chapter, you will learn: to define and characterize oxidation and reduction reactions to identify the oxidizing agent and reducing agent to determine the oxidation number of an atom of any element to balance redox equations with the oxidation-number-change method to balance a redox equation by breaking it into oxidation and reduction half-reactions