Here's a chemical.

It's a sugar, called glucose:

The black, white, and red spheres that make up this sugar are individual atoms. Atoms are the building
blocks of all matter, and all atoms of a specific element have the same behavior.
They are made up of three subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are
found in the nucleus of the atom, while electrons orbit the nucleus.
The number of electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus.
This is because atoms must be electrically neutral. Protons have a positive charge, electrons have a
negative charge, and neutrons have no charge.
The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom determines its atomic number. The atomic number of an
atom is unique and identifies the element. For example, all hydrogen atoms have one proton in their
nucleus, all carbon atoms have six protons in their nucleus, and all oxygen atoms have eight protons in
their nucleus.
The number of neutrons in the nucleus of an atom determines its mass number. The mass number of an
atom is the total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. For example, the most common isotope
of hydrogen has one proton and no neutrons in its nucleus, so its mass number is 1. The most common
isotope of carbon has six protons and six neutrons in its nucleus, so its mass number is 12. The most
common isotope of oxygen has eight protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus, so its mass number is 16.

Atoms can come together in countless arrangements and ratios, but when they come together in exactly
the way shown above, this is the arrangement we can call a molecule of sugar.

In a single teaspoon of glucose, there are billions of molecules, but in each one all the atoms are arranged
the exact same way in space and in the exact same ratio. Remove any of the atoms or change the way they
are connected to each other, and it wouldn’t be glucose anymore.
All reactions have a start and a finish. Anything present at the very start is called a reactant. What we end
up with are called products.
Lastly, to indicate that a reaction has occurred to change the reactants into the products, we draw an arrow
from left to right.

To understand this difference, we need to zoom in and explore what atoms are made of:

Note that this conceptual representation of atoms is convenient for this discussion, but the true nature of
the atom is more complicated — were we to zoom in on a real atom, we'd see quite a different picture!
Each atom consists of two major parts — the electrons and the nucleus. The electrons exist in a cloud
around the central nucleus.

The nucleus at the center of the atom is so stable that it can't be changed by chemical reactions. This is
because chemical reactions involve the electromagnetic force which is weak compared to the strong
nuclear force that holds the nucleus together (as you can tell by its name).

This means oxygen atoms will always remain oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms will always remain
hydrogen atoms, even when they are involved in chemical reactions.

In chemical reactions, electrons are the name of the game. When we boil down even the most
sophisticated reactions going on in industry, nature, and our bodies, it all comes down to the electrons.

Electron transactions cannot alter the identity/element of the atom since they don’t involve the nucleus or
the positive charge it bears. But adding two more electrons to an uncharged atom will give it a net
negative charge of -2.
Logically enough, the opposite is also true — losing electrons results in an atom becoming positively
charged.
We can think about it like this, the charge of an atom is determined by the number of electrons it has to
lose in order to become neutral again.

For an oxygen atom whose symbol is O, we can represent the double negative charge as O2-.

In the reaction,
NaCl + H2O → Na+ + Cl- + H2O
 - Sodium lost an electron (i.e, it needs electrons to be neutral again so its charge is +)
- Chloride gained an electron (i.e, it needs to lose electrons to be neutral again so its charge is -)

From our earlier discussion, we might conclude that the “transaction” of electrons consists of the chlorine
“taking” an electron from the sodium as they come apart. But, again, the atoms retain their fundamental
identity, because the nucleus isn't affected in any way by chemical reactions.

In reality, the association between sodium and chloride is slightly more complex than we've considered
here, and we'll delve into the details of that association (or bond) later.

Chemical equations are algebraic in that anything that appears in exactly the same form, unchanged, on
both sides of the equation cancels out. In this case, water isn't fundamentally changed in the reaction, so
the correct version of this equation looks like this:
NaCl → Na+ + Cl-

The total charge on all components is the same before and after the reaction.
The total number of electrons doesn’t change during the reaction. They're neither created out of thin air
nor destroyed. In reactions, atoms gain and lose electrons all the time, and this tendency is actually quite
predictable and will become useful for us later in our learning.
That is to say, if an atom gains electrons during a reaction — and thus has a more negative charge than it
had before — we know two things:
First, the electrons had to come from somewhere. And second, whatever atom lost them will end up with
a more positive charge than it had before.