A key step in balancing chemical equations is correctly identifying the formulas of the reactants and products. For example, consider the reaction between calcium oxide, CaO(s), and H2O1l2 to form aqueous calcium hydroxide. (b) Is it possible to balance the equation if you incorrectly identify the product as CaOH1aq2, and if so, what is the equation?

Video transcript

Hey everyone, we're told that the reaction between strontium oxide and water produces acquia strontium hydroxide. If the product is incorrectly identified as such, would we be able to balance this reaction? So let's go ahead and write out this reaction. So we have strontium oxide and we react it with water. And if we incorrectly identify strontium hydroxide without a subscript of two, let's see if we can balance this out right now. We have one of strontium two of hydrogen and two of oxygen in our product side we have one of strontium one of hydrogen and one of oxygen. If we add a coefficient of two prior to our product, we can then change our hydrogen into two and bounce us out. But we also change our strontium into two as well and our oxygen into two. Moving to our react inside, we want to balance out our strong teams so we can do that by adding a two prior to our strong team oxide. So this changes our strong team into two, but it also changes our oxygen's into three. So looking at what we have, there is no way we can balance this reaction. We need to write strontium hydroxide correctly with our subscript of two after our hydroxide in order to correctly identify this reaction. So I hope this made sense and let us know if you have any questions