ABSTRACT
This chapter is an introduction to the basic concepts used throughout the first volume. It starts with a brief overview of the structure of matter and the units used in physics. The majority of this chapter is dedicated to establishing the methods used with vectors throughout this volume. Concentrating on vectors of which students have a phenomenological understanding, including force, displacement, and velocity, the steps needed to find the components of a vector, find the magnitude and direction of a vector, and adding vectors are discussed and examples are provided. By the end of this chapter, students should be able to find the components of a vector and add two or more vectors together to find a resultant vector.
