More Advice

When doing this experiment, the kinds of data that you look for are such things as the pH and precipitates.

You use pH paper so that you can identify acids and bases. Be careful when trying to match up the formulas of acids and bases with the pH of the solutions. Sometimes salts can be acidic or basic. Sometimes a bit of acid is added to a solution to help dissolve a salt and stabilize the solution.

You also look for precipitation reactions. You mix solutions together to see which ones precipitate, and that together with the solubility rules tells you about what some of the different combinations can be.

Also look for the formation of gases. Gas bubbles would indicate that you have a bicarbonate or a carbonate as one of the solutions if it reacts with acid to give off carbon dioxide gas. You also "look" for the odor of ammonia when things are added to bases, because a base added to ammonium ion will give ammonium hydroxide, which evaporates as NH₃ and has the characteristic smell of ammonia.

Take a look at the introduction and instructions to the experiment in your workbook. There is quite a bit of information before you actually get to the experiment itself. Please read through all of the instructions for this experiment. There's the introduction which tells you about the nature of the experiment, lab hints, a set of solubility rules tailored to this experiment, another example, and a practice problem.

It's very important that you pay attention to what you are doing and record your data carefully. You can get yourself rreally fouled up if you did something different from you thought you did. For example, if you thought you added solution 2 to solution 8, but you really picked up solution 3 and added it to 8, you're going to have problems identifying what's in solution 2. So be careful and pay attention to the hints that are given.

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E-mail instructor: Eden Francis