now that we know a little bit about how the periodic table came to be we want to be able to read it since it contains a multitude of information about each element periodic tables might include different information but there are certain things that will be included in each square or block on the table no matter what let's examine those items now first each block will certainly contain the chemical symbol for the element it represents these symbols contain either one or two letters if it's one letter it's capitalized if it's two letters the first letter is capitalized and the second is not this is so that we can unambiguously assign symbols to every element because there are a great deal of elements we can't simply abbreviate each element by the first letter in the name of the element because many elements start with the same letter we will usually assign the simplest abbreviation to the more abundant element that starts with that letter for the sake of convenience for example carbon is abbreviated as c but what about cobalt copper and calcium these will be c-o-c-u and c-a many of these abbreviations are intuitive but some are not let's look at some of the less intuitive ones iron can't be i because i stands for iodine we can't use ir either as that's taken for iridium in such a case we may default to latin names in latin iron is ferrum so we use fe from ferum to symbolize iron we use this strategy to come up with symbols for other elements like silver gold and lead as well using latin roots in addition to the chemical symbol every block will certainly have the atomic number and the atomic mass for that element the atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus and it is a number that is unique to that element for example the atomic number of carbon is six because the carbon nucleus will always have six protons in it that is precisely what defines carbon is an atomic nucleus with six protons if a nucleus has six protons it's carbon and if it doesn't it's not carbon next the atomic masses that are listed are average atomic masses which explains why they all have decimals rather than being integer values that we could expect when adding up the number of particles in the nucleus we must take into account all the isotopes of an element when calculating the average mass of all the atoms of that element beyond these three data a block might contain the full name of the element or other quantitative elements like electronegativity electron configuration or atomic radius but these will come later for now as we read the periodic table we should simply understand what the chemical symbol atomic number and atomic mass are referring to