AKIHIRO N.

MERCADO BSMT 1A

4TH THINKING JOURNAL

Good day! This is my fourth thinking journal and I’m so glad that I gained another
essential lesson. A mole (symbol Mol) is the base unit of quantity of a substance
in the metric system. A mole is the quantity of a substance that contains 6.02 x
1023 units. A "unit" is the smallest measurable entity in the substance, generally
either an atom or a molecule. The number of units in a mole was determined by
Italian chemist (a scientist specializing in the composition, structure, properties,
and reactions of matter) Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856), one of the founders of
modern physical chemistry. For this reason, the value 6.02 x 1023 is called
Avogadro's number. One mole of a substance is equal to the substance's atomic
weight (the average weight of an atom of an element) or molecular weight, in
grams. You often want to know how many molecules you have in a sample of a
substance. Counting the molecules individually would be completely impractical.
Even if you had a way to see the individual molecules, there are just too many,
even in a tiny sample. Moles were defined to solve the problem of counting large
numbers of molecules. With moles, you count the number of molecules in the
sample by weighing it. The mole is useful in chemistry because it allows different
substances to be measured comparably. Using the same number of moles of two
substances, both amounts have the same number of molecules or atoms. The
mole makes it easier to understand chemical equations in practical terms. So the
equation: 2H2 + O2 → 2H2O can be understood, as "two moles of hydrogen plus
one mole of oxygen yields two moles of water." Moles are useful in chemical
calculations because they enable the calculation of yields and other values when
dealing with particles of different mass.