No thank goodness! When I was an undergraduate at college I knew it pretty well – there are actually important trends and general rules in the periodic table that are more important than each specific entry in the table.
No I don’t and I never have known it off by heart! I remember a physics teacher in high school saying we had to know every single element off by heart but I thought that memorising the table just for the sake of it was not a great use of my time (so I didn’t do it…). Like Kevin said, there are some general trends and rules that can be important to devote time to learning but I see little value in knowing all elements in the table off by heart, at least not for my job!
I remember the following order: H, He, Li, Be, Na, Mg, K, Ca on the ‘left side’ of the periodic table, and B, [???], Ne at the top of the ‘right side’. The rest, not so much. But outside of exams, I’ve never been in a situation where knowing it off by heart would have saved me! If needed, you can always look it up online in a flash.
And as the others are saying, the general rules that govern how and why the elements are where they are in the periodic table is a lot more important than knowing which elements are where to begin with!!
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