The following diagram represents the collection of elements formed by a decomposition reaction. (a) If the blue spheres represent N atoms and the red ones represent O atoms, what was the empirical formula of the original compound?

Video transcript

Hello everyone today. We are being asked to determine the empirical formula of the starting material of the decomposition reaction based on the given image. And so decomposition you're going to go from your product and you're going to break it down into your reactant. So we're gonna be mainly focused on our on the box on the right. And so we have nitrogen atoms and hydrogen atoms. And so for our reactant we see that we have Hydrogen, which they're paired up. So there's two And this is added to three nitrogen gas molecules and this ultimately formed six NH 3 molecules. And so to find the empirical formula, which is the simplest whole number of elements, we must find a common denominator to our common factor to divide these by. And so if you look at 93 and six, the common one is three. So we're going to divide each of these by three so that we result in three H two plus into to yield to n H three. And so if we ignore the coefficients, we can then note that our empirical formula is going to involve n H three. I hope this helped. And until next time