Welcome to MCAT Basics, your ultimate guide to the essential topics you need to master for the MCAT,

brought to you by the physicians at Med School Coach. Every week, Sam Smith breaks down high-yield MCAT topics, ensuring you're primed for success on test day.

Join Sam as we explore the most crucial subjects outlined by the AAMC, pulled from official

practice materials and third-party resources. Get ready to elevate your MCAT game with topics

tailored to maximize your score potential. Hello, I'm Sam Smith. This podcast covers

absorption spectra and molecular structure. I'm going to talk about IR, UVVIS, mass spec,

and NMR. And I'm going to kind of tie in how each of these different techniques is used to

identify molecular structure. I'll give you a little bit of background on each technique,

and then I'll dive into numbers and other info that you should know for each of these on the MCAT.

With that said, this material will show up on two out of the four MCAT sections.

That's the bio-bi-com section and the chem-fiz section.

I hope you find the information in this podcast helpful for your studies,

and good luck as you prepare for the MCAT.

As the title of this podcast suggests, I'm going to talk quite a bit about absorption spectra.

Now, not every single technique that I'm going to talk about in this podcast is considered

absorption spectroscopy. So that's kind of the first thing I want to answer here is what exactly

is absorption spectroscopy. Absorption spectroscopy is a technique that measures the absorption

of radiation as a function of frequency or wavelength due to its interaction with the

sample. In English, basically, what happens is that you have a sample. You know, you don't know

something about the sample and you want to study it. And so you shoot radiation and think

electromagnetic waves at the sample. And these waves have a known wavelength or a known frequency, and then you

see how much of that radiation the sample absorbs. In short, a detector sits behind the sample,

...