{"id":3462,"date":"2018-01-19T21:43:29","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T21:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/wordpress\/lavie\/?p=3462"},"modified":"2018-01-19T21:43:29","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T21:43:29","slug":"all-about-alcohol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/2018\/01\/19\/all-about-alcohol\/","title":{"rendered":"All About Alcohol"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Question: I have a very broad question: what <\/i><\/b>is<\/b> alcohol, and why does it work like it does? To be clear, I know that alcohol is in drinks and gets us drunk. But I don\u2019t understand how it works, really, or why you can light alcohol on fire in the movies, yet we put it in our car engines safely (because antifreeze is alcohol, right?–but if that\u2019s true, then why can\u2019t you drink it?). I know this is a big question, but I\u2019m looking for a general sort of answer, and I\u2019m kind of too embarrassed to ask my friends (and please don\u2019t tell me to just Google it–everything I find is full of words I don\u2019t understand).<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Answer:\u00a0\u00a0You are absolutely right to note that alcohol is everywhere in our culture and in our world. It is a big part of our social culture and also plays roles in everything from cleaning products to green fuels. As we\u2019ll see, part of the reason for alcohol\u2019s flexibility is the fact that it\u2019s not just one compound, but a whole group of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a college student, you probably know alcohol best as a part of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol plays a major role in our culture and is a big business, say the retailers at <\/span>beverage distributorship Columbia Distributing<\/span><\/a>. Bars and nightclubs pull in <\/span>$24 billion in revenues each year<\/span><\/a>. Drinking alcohol also plays a big role in college life, and that\u2019s not necessarily a good thing. <\/span>More than a third (37.9%) of college students report binge drinking within the past month<\/span><\/a>. That\u2019s very dangerous, as alcohol poisoning can be deadly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beer and liquor are dangerous in high doses. But, as you point out, there are more dangerous types of alcohol out there–like the type in antifreeze, <\/span>which can kill in doses that are only a fraction of the size of a serving of beer or wine<\/span><\/a>. Why is this?<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s because there\u2019s actually more than one type of alcohol. An alcohol is an organic compound that has a certain structural feature in its molecules: <\/span>to be exact, it needs a hydroxyl functional group attached to a saturated carbon atom<\/span><\/a>. That\u2019s technical stuff, but the bottom line is that there are different molecules that fit this description, and while they all have something in common (and are all considered alcohol), they are all different. We drink ethanol, but there is also methanol (the antifreeze one), isopropyl alcohol, and cyclohexanol, to name just a few.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you might expect, these different types of alcohol can be used for all sorts of different things. Alcohol is used in the production of <\/span>biodiesel, say developers at SeQuential<\/span><\/a>. Alcohol can be used as a disinfectant, burned as a simple fuel, and, of course, enjoyed in a beverage. Just remember: it\u2019s not always the same type of alcohol that plays all of these roles!<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.\u201d — Ovid<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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*This is sponsored advertising content* Question: I have a very broad question: what is alcohol, and why does it work like it does? To be clear, I know that alcohol is in drinks and gets […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-campus-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}