Book excerpt: ASPC is designed for honors-level or accelerated high school freshmen. It is a physical science text that trims away the fat and goes deep so that students get a solid preparatory foundation in these two subjects. Centripetal Press advocates a "physics first" approach to the high school science sequence. In short, having a light physics-based course in 9th grade creates the possibility of carry-over into later science course in a way that the standard "biology first" sequence does not. Energy, work, heat transfer, the atomic model, the periodic table, substances, atomic bonding, and other subjects require only Algebra I mathematics. (Freshmen using ASPC should have already completed Algebra I in the 8th grade.) In addition to these subjects, important skills in the laboratory, plus unit conversions, scientific notation, metric prefixes, and the writing of lab reports are essential skills that students will thoroughly learn in this text. Imagine going on to accelerated 10th grade chemistry with all of these skills and concepts firmly in hand! The chemistry class can cover more ground when they do not need to cover those essentials. And the practice of building upon skills already learned supports the "mastery learning" paradigm employed in every Centripetal Press textbook.