Counting Atoms 10/9/17-10/13/17

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks3/science/chemical_material_behaviour/compounds_mixtures/revision/4/

What is counting atoms and how do you do it? Counting atoms is literally finding out how many atoms are in a certain formula. Like the one above. How do you do it? Easy, as you know each element can only have one capitol letter in each chemical symbol, like Na or S, so each time you see a capitol letter you know it's a new element. But what about the numbers at the bottom? The numbers at the bottom are called subscripts they tell you how many atoms of that element there are. But what if there's no subscript that means that their is one of that element.  Though, sometimes parts of the formula is in parenthesis like this Na2(SO4)3 this means that you would multiply the amount of atoms in the parenthesis by the number out side of it. so we would end up getting Na2S3O12 because we multiplied the number of atoms inside the parenthesis by the number outside of it. Then we have formulas that look like this 3Na2SO4. The 3 at the start of the formula is called a coefficient. A coefficient is a number at the start of the formula that tells you how many of the whole entire formula do you have. once you have figured out the coefficients and subscripts and parenthesis then you can do the math. You find out how many atoms of each elements there are - using the coefficients, subscripts and parenthesis- then you add together the number of atoms there are. so for the picture above there would be 7 atoms in all.

S&EP

SP5: using mathematics

We used mathematics to help us determine the amount of atoms in a formula. We had to multiply to figure out the number of atoms in a parenthesis and when their are a coefficient. We also had to add when we added together the number of atoms of each element to find out what the number of atoms in our formula was.

XCC

XCC:structure and function

i think that this is an example of structure and function because the structure of a molecule determines the function of the same molecule. This is because if H2O didn't have the same formula/structure it would not have the same function. I think that this relates to the topic of formula because of the reason above. It also relates to formulas and counting atoms because the structure of the formula is different than another molecule's structure which is why they have different functions.