Chemical Equation Basics

What does a chemical equation tell you?
A chemical equation is the written expression of a chemical reaction.Welcome to MooMooMath and Science
In this video I would like to talk about chemical equations.
Chemical reactions occur all around us.
They can be exciting like these fireworks, also helpful like these fires..
A chemical reaction can be represented using a chemical equation.
Let's breakdown this chemical equation and see what information it contains.
First,the reactants are on the left of the arrow and products are on the right of the arrow
This equation has methane which is ch4 combining with oxygen which is O2
The plus marks on the left of the arrow tells which elements or compounds are combining
The arrow tells you what it will produce or yield. The right side of the arrow are your products or what is produced
The products in this equation are co2 which is carbon dioxide and h2o or water.
Each capital letter represents a new element and each element has a symbol. The symbol for every element can be found on the periodic table.
A number behind a letter tells is a subscript and represents how many ions of the element are in the chemical equation
H20 tells you that the compound has two hydrogens and 1 oxygen
What do the numbers in front of a letter tell you?
Coefficients are the numbers in front of the formulas
the coefficients give the number of moles of each substance involved in the reaction. In the example reaction 2 H2 + O2 yields 2 H2O
two moles of hydrogen react with one mole of oxygen and produce two moles of water.
Atoms are neither created nor destroyed.
In other words it must be balanced.
If you count the atoms with this reaction you will notice that it is not balanced.
This new equation is balanced because you have equal numbers of elements on both sides.
I will leave a note in the show notes for a video I created on balancing equations.
You can also indicate the physical states of the reactants and products
Here are some symbols
S = solid
l = liquid
g = gas
and aq = dissolved in water
In this chemical equation you have a solid plus a liquid and it produces a hydrogen gas dissolved in water.
So there you go
chemical equations
Reactants on the left, products on the right