英语时差：碳，氧，氢（上）

Robert Frost once wrote a poem about coming across an old woodpile in the forest. In describing it he refers to the “slow, smokeless burning of decay.” What a great line of poetry. The neat part about it is, it’s also technically correct. Decay is an extremely slow burning process. Or, you could say, fire is an extremely fast decaying process. In either case, what you have is the combination of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Carbon and oxygen atoms love to link up with each other and form carbon dioxide. Right behind them in the race to merge come hydrogen and oxygen, which love to form di hydrogen oxide. It’s this kind of rapid merging of atoms that we call fire. Hold on! you say. Fire has, like, flames and stuff!