Compounds And Elements: The Law Of Conservation Of Mixtures

The objective of Chapter 6: Compounds and Elements was to determine how to synthesize and decompose pure substances, distinguish the difference between compounds and elements, and to determine the difference between complete and incomplete reactions. Previous chapters that contained valuable background knowledge were Chapter 2: Mass Changes in Closed Systems and Chapter 5: The Separation of Mixtures. The Law of Conservation of Mass, which was tested in Chapter 2, proved to be vital in this chapter by helping groups understand the reactions that the group could not necessarily see, but could be verified by this law, such as a gain in mass when a substance is heated in an open environment. The ideas of Chapter 5 about separating mixtures were stretched further into this chapter, where groups separated substances further. Additionally, in Experiment 6.7, groups separated a mixture using solubility like it was discussed in Chapter 5. The …show more content…
According to the class histogram, the majority of the data was centered around the mass ratio of (Zn Reacted)/(Product Produced) being 0.48. This ratio was not affected by the varying amounts of zinc that each group used, and was constant throughout the class even though each group had a different amount of zinc react with the hydrochloric acid. A possible error that may have occurred during this lab was the used of filter paper to filter out the unreacted zinc from the liquid. Filter paper would absorb some of the liquid, and some of the zinc chloride may have been contained in that absorbed liquid. This would cause the mass of zinc chloride to seem smaller, which would create the illusion that the ratio of the mass of zinc reacted to the mass of product produced is bigger than it is in