For the purposes of general chemistry, an atom can be viewed as constructed of three types of subatomic building blocks: electrons, protons and neutrons.
Electrons are the smallest of the three and carry negative charge. They lie far from the nucleus (center) of the atom. This distance makes them comparatively easy to remove, and be shared with other atoms in the formation of chemical bonds.
Protons lie in the nucleus of an atom. They are about 1800 times heavier than electrons and carry a positive charge of magnitude identical to the magnitude of the negative charge on the electron.
