The following diagram represents the collection of elements formed by a decomposition reaction. (b) Could you draw a diagram representing the molecules of the compound that had been decomposed? Why or why not?

Video transcript

Hi everyone. This problem reads The collection of elements created by a decomposition reaction is shown in the following diagram. Could you illustrate the molecules of the broken down compound using a diagram? Why or why not? Okay. So let's take a look at our diagram and we're going to let the green spheres B. A. And we're going to let the yellow spheres B. B. Okay. And so if we create a ratio of a to be looking at our diagram, our ratio is going to be 1-2. So we can create a hypothetical empirical formula. With this and that hypothetical empirical and formula is going to be a to B. All right. And with that we cannot illustrate the molecules of the broken down compound using a diagram because we don't know if the molecular formula is the same as this. Hypothetical empirical formula. The empirical formula is the lowest possible ratio for a compound. But there are other possible molecular formulas. So because we don't know what the molecular formula is, we're not going to be able to illustrate the molecules of the broken down compound using a diagram. So out of all of our answer choices, answer choice A is the one that describes this. It says no, because we cannot determine if the molecular formula is the same as the empirical formula. Okay, so that's it for this problem. I hope this was helpful