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What comes to mind when you hear the word restaurant? From this single word you can envision a business where food is served. When you add one more word, different information is revealed. Seafood restaurant helps you predict what will be on the menu. If you add "seafood restaurant" to a search on a digital map, all kinds of symbols will pop up that tell you cost (in dollar signs), customer ratings (in stars), and driving distance (in miles). A chemical equation also stores a wealth of information in just a few numbers, letters and symbols. 
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What is a chemical equation?
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Any time there is a chemical change, a chemical reaction must have occurred. A chemical reaction converts one or more substances into new substances. Atoms are neither created nor destroyed during the process of a chemical reaction, but they are rearranged to form new substances. A chemical equation is a series of symbols that represents a chemical reaction. The chemical equation describes the chemical change by telling us exactly which atoms are rearranged into which compounds.
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A reactant is a substance that is changed in the reaction into a different substance. Reactants appear on the left of the chemical equation. A product is a substance that is produced by the reaction. Products appear on the right hand side of the chemical equation. The arrow tells the direction of the reaction - which is usually from reactants to products. If we were to read the chemical equation in the above example, it says this: "two moles of hydrogen plus one mole of oxygen react to produce two moles of water."
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A chemical equation can be interpreted two ways: in terms of atoms or in terms of moles. The atom interpretation is useful when you want to understand how molecules change during the reaction. The moles interpretation is more useful when you want to use the reaction to calculate quantities of products or reactants.
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