As we look at our surroundings we see a large variety of things with different shapes and textures everything in this universe is made up of material which scientists have named matter the air we beat the food stones starts to plant and animals even a small drop of water or a particle of sand everything is matter we can also see as we look around that all the things mentioned above occupy space and have mass in other words they have both mass and volume Early Times human beings have being trying to understand their surroundings early Indian philosopher classified matter in the form of five basic element the air earth fire sky and water. According to them everything living or nonliving was made up of these five basic element ancient Greek philosopher had arrived at similar classification of matter modern day scientists have evolved two types of classification of Matter based on their physical properties and chemical nature in this chapter we shall learn about Matter based on its physical properties chemical aspects of matter will be taken up in subsequent chapters. For a long time two schools of thought prevailed regarding the nature of matter one school believe matter to be continuous like a block of wood where is the other thought of Matter was made up of particles likes and letters perform an activity to decide about this nature of matter is it continuous or particulate? Particles of matter are continuously moving that is their processes what we call the kinetic energy as the temperature rises particles move faster so we can say that with increase in temperature the kinetic energy of the particles also increased in above three activities we observed that particles of matter in termux on their own with each other they do so by getting into the spaces between the particles this intermixing of particles of two different types of matter on their own is called diffusion we also observed to do that on heating diffusion becomes faster. why does this happen? Observe different types of matter around you what are its different states we can see that matter around us exist in three different states solid liquid and gas these States of matter arise due to the variation in the characteristics of the particles of matter now let a study about the properties these three States of matter in detail solid.