A Mole is a Unit

F C G C, F C-Bm-Am G F-G-C

F C

A mole is an animal that burrows in the ground

G C

or a spot on your chin that you gotta shave around

F C Bm Am

but there’s another kind of mole that’s of interest to me

G F-G-C

it’s the kind of mole they use in chemistry

Chorus

A mole is a unit (or have you heard?)

containing 6 x 10^23

that’s a 6 with 23 zeroes at the end

much too big a number to comprehend

now, say you had a mole of pennies to distribute around the world

give to each of the 7 billion grownups, boys, and girls

there wouldn’t be a single soul down and outta luck

cuz everybody in the world would get a trillion bucks

or say you had a mole of paper and stacked it toward the sky

paper’s awful thin, but that pile would get so high

it’d reach up into outer space, in fact I think you’d find

it’d go up to the moon and back 80 Billion times

(Chorus)

Now suppose a mole of marshmallows fell upon the planet

of each square inch of land and sea, ya think that you could stand it?

that layer would be 12 miles high and, of course, block out the sun

we’re talkin close to five Million Trillion tons

Well, maybe we could save ourselves if we all started eatin

one marshmallow each second (not two, cuz that’d be cheatin)

with 7 Billion people munchin, how long d’ya think it’d take?

40 Million years, and that’s without a bathroom break

(Chorus)

but say you had a mole of atoms, would the pile be immense?

should I say the answer now or leave you in suspense?

well, atoms are so very very small, you understand?

you could hold a mole of atoms in the palm of your hand

so shake a little sugar in middle of your palm

now you don’t wanna spill it, so try and stay calm

you hardly can imagine and barely realize

there are more atoms in that sugar than stars up in the sky

(Chorus)