Slide 5

The Brønsted-Lowry Theory

Acid is anything that transfers a proton, and a base is anything that accepts that proton. So as you can
guess these transfers must happen between two substances. Thus we get conjugate acids and conjugate
bases.

Steps to finding a CA and CB of any substance:

Take water H2O the CA (add one H therefore H3O, then deal with the charges we started with a zero
charge on water but for CA’s we add (+) 1 to that: so 0+1=+1 so we get H3O+

Now to find the CB (subtract one H therefore OH, the charge on water is still zero except now instead of
adding a 1 we subtract 1: so 0-1= -1 so we get OH-

These rules apply to any chemical species!

Slide 6 and 7 show the reaction of the production of NH4+ from the non OH- containing reactant NH3

Slide 8

HCl(A)+ NH3(B)>NH4+(CA) and Cl-(CB)

Slide 9

conjugate base conjugate acid

Cl- HCl

NH3 NH4+

C2H300- HC2H3O2

CN– HCN

F- HF