Question

what does polar and non-polar means ?

Answer 1

here are the best links :-
1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVL24HAesnc
2) http://www.school-for-champions.com/chemistry/polar_molecules.htm#.VBb-2cKSwik
3) http://users.stlcc.edu/gkrishnan/polar.html
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_polarity

Answer 2

hope you understand. @HatcrewS

Answer 3

Polar means it has a pole. What's a pole? It's just when you have an unbalanced amount of charge on one end of a molecule. For instance, water is a popular polar molecule because it looks like this: The oxygen end is more negative than the hydrogen end which is more positive.

Methane on the other end is nonpolar, because all the ends cancel each other out, like this: All the hydrogen atoms are equally spaced and so they all cancel out each other's effects evenly.

Polarity is a good measure of how likely something will dissolve another, the general rule is "like dissolves like". For instance if you have water, since all the water atoms have poles, hey sort of attract each other like little bar magnets, with the positive side attracting the negative side of other polar molecules.

Some molecules are so large that they have a polar and nonpolar part, like soap. The nonpolar part of a soap molecules dissolves oils and dirt on your hands leaving the polar part of the molecules are on the outside of the little bubble they make around the dirt. Then when you wash them off with water, that outside polar part gets dissolved by the water, rinsing away all the dirt and oils with it, kinda cool.