In your own understanding, Differentiate tools, supplies and equipment.
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In your own understanding, Differentiate tools, supplies and equipment.
In your own understanding, Differentiate tools, supplies and equipment.
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Answer:
The most telling difference I can think of is that a tool’s inherent nature remains (mostly, or at least not permanently) unchanged in the processes it’s used for and is used to bring about a change in a process/measure something that changes. For example, a hammer, wrench or a weighing balance would be a tool since it is used to bring about a change but does not get changed in the process.
A material is something that is used for a process but gets changed either temporarily or permanently and is what the process is being carried out on by a tool. But like most else, there are some grey areas. For example, when you hammer a nail into a wall, you could say that both the hammer and nail are tools and the wall is the material since only the wall gets permanently changed (deformed) in the process. You could call the nail both a tool and a material because no visible property of it gets changed permanently (if you hammer straight enough) and it is used to bring about a change in the wall but by my definition it is also a material because there are microscopic changes that occur when it is being hammered.
Similarly, if we use an elastic band to catapult a rock we could say that the catapult as a whole is a tool and the rock is a material but the elastic band does get temporarily changed in the process so it could also be classified as a material.
However, by the dictionary definition a tool is :
“a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function”
and a material is:
“the matter from which a thing is or can be made”
So according to this definition most of the things I mentioned are not materials. Rather, they are all just “things” made of comprising materials such as cement in the wall, iron in the nail and rubber and wood for the elastic band.
So though I have attempted to define the differences in my own way, it is up to the user’s discretion, which definition is most suitable. A last point that could be made is that something can be a material or just an object (not a material, maybe a tool) when looked at from a bulk/macroscopic perspective or a microscopic perspective. Using the former, a nail is a material (for a carpenter, mechanic and so on) but for someone who is looks at things from a microscopic perspective, iron/wood would be the material that the nail (a bulk object) is made up of.
Hope I’ve made some sense!