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 Forming water
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In essence, a chemical equation is a shorthand
expression of a sentence which describes the starting and ending
materials. For example:
hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water In symbol form this becomes: H2 + O2 → H2O But there is a problem here. If we count the
element symbols, taking subscripts into account, the numbers of
each type of atoms are not the same on opposite sides of the
arrows. We say this reaction is "not balanced" because
it does not show conservation of mass. More importantly, it does
not show the ratio in which hydrogen and oxygen actually react. |
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