McMurry/Fay's atoms-first text progresses from the simplest building blocks to successively more complex concepts enabling the authors to tell a cohesive story about chemistry that follows an intuitive logic. This unified thread of ideas helps students build a better foundation and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of chemical concepts. Students can more easily understand the micro-to-macro connections between unobservable atoms and the observable behavior of matter in daily life, and are brought immediately into real chemistry_instead of being forced to first spend time with arithmetic.