Lab 5A: Mole Baggie

The purpose of this lab was to firm up our knowledge of moles and the formulas accompanying them, as well as using the resource of the periodic table to back up initial thoughts. For example, for Set A, we were given a bag with the mass of said bag and the number of moles in the bag. From there, we weighed the bag with the contents inside of it, then subtracted the mass of the bag from that number. Then, we divided the mass of the solid by the number of moles, and got the molar mass of that bag. After that, we got the molar masses for all of the five possible compounds (sodium chloride, potassium sulfate, zinc oxide, sodium sulfate, and calcium carbonate), and paired the molar mass of the contents of the bag with the compound closest to that measurement. So, for bag A1, it was filled with Sodium Chloride.

Set B was a little different. We were still given the mass of the empty bag, but instead of the number of moles, we were given the number of particles. We still started off the same way, with finding the mass of the bag with contents inside, but from there, we did something different. We divided  the number of particles by 1, then divided that by Avagardo's number. The reason we did that was so that we could find the number of moles in the bag. From there, we returned to what we had done in the previous calculation, which was divide the mass of the solid by the number of moles. With that number on hand, we referenced the list of the molar masses of the possible compounds, and paired the number we found with the number closest matching a compound. So, as a result, we found bag B5 to be filled with Calcium Carbonate.