Any material can be classified as either an element, a compound or a mixture, depending on its properties. An element is composed of identical atoms and cannot be further divided. An example is copper. A block of copper will contain only atoms of copper and any division of this block will still yield copper. A compound is composed of elements in a certain fixed ratio and has different properties than its constituent elements. An example is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is made up of oxygen and carbon in a 2:1 ratio. A mixture is composed of two or more elements or compounds in a non-fixed ratio and can be divided into individual constituents. An example is trail mix, which can be easily separated into constituents.
Wood is an example of a mixture. It contains cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose, in a variable ratio. Wood can actually be classified as a heterogeneous mixture, since the constituents are distributed non-uniformly.
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