Wednesday, March 6, 2013

An example of a compound

An example of a compound is the common salt in pure form.
The molecular formula or the chemical formula of this compound is NaCl and it's a pure homogeneous compound.

The general physical appearance of this compound is :
it is white , crystalline in nature.The taste of this compound as we are all  familiar with:  it is salty.
The given compound is a salt and  is called sodium chloride.
This  chemical species is  called a compound, because of the following reasons:
It cant be separated into its constituent elements by any physical means and
the properties of this compound are totally different from the properties of its constituent elements.


an example of a compound

why NaCl is a compound


     1) NaCl is a compound,because it is made up of Na and Cl atoms in a fixed ratio of 1:1
    2)   In the formation of the compound  NaCl, some amount of energy transformations took place and made this formation of NaCl.
      a permanent change ..... which means we cannot revert to the elemental state of Na and Cl from   NaCl  by any physical means.
      3)Example: the properties of Na and the properties of Cl are totally different than the properties of NaCl compound.

Other properties of a compound.

For example Na is a soft metal with grey colour and a metallic lustre and it is a solid , highly reactive  in presence of water( so its kept in kerosene always ), it can form an oxide as Na2O.  when in presence of air and this oxide readily dissolves in water to form NaOH,....... but the salt has none of these properties.... the salt is crytalline , white in colour , dissolves readily in water but does  not form any base or alkali in water ,  is not so reactive in air or water  and has no metallic lustre.
The other element that forms NaCl is chlorine and that we know is a gas and is acidic ,,, it is also suffocating and acidic to moist  litmus.

Properties of compounds are thus not the same.....

But the salt is totally neutral and is not a gas but is a solid .In other words the compound has properties far different from the properties of any of the constituent elements.
 Further we cannot separate the constituent elements by any physical means.That is why we can differentiate between a compound and a mixture and study of compounds  becomes more interesting.

1 comment:

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