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Ch.16 - Acid-Base Equilibria

Chapter 16, Problem 25c

Predict the products of the following acid–base reactions, and predict whether the equilibrium lies to the left or to the right of the reaction arrow: (c) NO2-1aq2 + H2O1l2 Δ

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Hi everyone for this problem. It reads complete the given reaction and identify if the equilibrium lies to the left or right. So we have a flooring an ion and water. So the first thing we're going to do here is complete this reaction. So let's write down what we have. We have our flooring an ion plus water. So what we can recognize here is that this flooring an ion is a conjugate base. So I'll go ahead and write conjugate base there. And so what that means is the water is going to be an acid. And when we have a conjugate base and an acid, an acid is a proton donor. So this water here that is serving as our acid is going to donate a proton here. And so what we'll see with our equilibrium is that we'll have Hydrofluoric acid as our acid that this conjugate base derived from. And because water is losing a proton, we're left with a hydroxide ion. Okay, so we know that Hydrofluoric acid is a weak acid. Okay, so this weak acid has the florid ion as its conjugate base. Alright, so the next thing we need to do is identify if the equilibrium lies to the left or to the right. Okay, so what we're going to do now is compare our two acids. So we have Hydrofluoric acid is our weak acid and we also have water that's serving as a acid. So we need to see which one is stronger is Hydrofluoric acid stronger or is water stronger. And we can determine this by looking at the electro negativity of our central atoms. Okay, so we have flooring okay that we're comparing to oxygen. Alright, so with our electro negativity trends, flooring is going to be more electro negative than oxygen. Okay, so that means our stronger acid out of the two is going to be our Hydrofluoric acid. Okay, so we can write Hydrofluoric acid is stronger than water. These are two acids that we're comparing. Okay. And so when it comes to equilibrium, equilibrium favors the formation of the weaker acid. Okay, so water is our weaker acid. So our equilibrium is going to favor the formation of water. So in terms of our equilibrium it's going to favor water. Okay? Or favors H 20. So that means the direction that our equilibrium is going to want to go is to the left. Okay, so out of the two option choices here we see that option A is going to be our correct answer. We completed the reaction and we said that the equilibrium will favor the left side. That's the end of this problem. I hope this was helpful