Up to this point we've learned how to balance simple chemical reactions, but now we're going to learn the approach needed to balance redox reactions and with balancing these redox reactions it's going to be required a new approach that accounts for the transfer of electrons between reactants. Remember, 1 reactant loses electrons and therefore is oxidized while the other one gains electrons and is reduced.

We're going to say when it comes to balancing redox reactions, we can either do it under acidic conditions or basic conditions. Here we're going to take a look first at acidic conditions. We're going to say for acidic redox reactions we generally have the presence of the H⁺ ion. And we're going to say here, redox reactions not only balance the atoms of electrons, but also charge and electrons.

We're going to say here that when it comes to balancing redox reactions, we have what are called half reactions. We're going to say balancing a redox reaction begins with identifying its half reactions. 1/2 reaction is either the oxidation or reduction reaction portion of a redox reaction. So we're going to have two of them. One 1/2 reaction is going to be for oxidation, the other one's going to be for reduction.

Now we're going to say usually 1/2 reaction is obtained by identifying the elements that are not oxygen or hydrogen. That's what we look for in our redox reaction to first determine how to break it up into its two half reactions. Now that we know that little piece of information, click on to the next video and let's take a look at an example question. We have to find the half reactions of a redox reaction.