The half life of a radioactive substance is 14 days. If 48g of this substance is stored, after how many days will 1.5g of the original substance remain?
Question 1 Report
The half life of a radioactive substance is 14 days. If 48g of this substance is stored, after how many days will 1.5g of the original substance remain?
Answer Details
The half-life of a radioactive substance is the time taken for the substance to reduce to half of its original quantity. In this case, the half-life of the substance is 14 days, which means that after 14 days, half of the substance would have decayed.
Let's calculate how many half-lives are needed for 48g to reduce to 1.5g:
48g → 24g (1 half-life)
24g → 12g (2 half-lives)
12g → 6g (3 half-lives)
6g → 3g (4 half-lives)
3g → 1.5g (5 half-lives)
Therefore, it will take 5 half-lives for 48g of the substance to decay to 1.5g.
The total time taken for 5 half-lives is 5 x 14 = 70 days.
Therefore, after 70 days, 1.5g of the original substance will remain.
Hence, the answer is 70 days.
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