BY Team Aakash Byju's

How to Read Modern Periodic Table of Elements With Names & Symbols

A tabular display of all 118 chemical elements is called the ‘periodic table’. It is widely considered an icon of chemistry.

To learn how to read the periodic table, we shall start by visualising its structure.

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A modern periodic table looks like the one shown here:

Let’s see what are the easier ways to read the modern periodic table.

Reading the periodic table from top left to bottom right is the best way because the elements are arranged by their atomic numbers.

Identify the groups of elements that have similar physical or chemical properties.

The groups can also be called ‘Families’.

For eg., all elements listed above the element boron are known to be belonging to the boron family.

So you can go down the group from top to bottom as shown in the image below.

The known groups are

Note that the symbols of all the elements are usually the first or the first & second letters of their IUPAC names.

See how the elements are divided into different families in the above image.