The Properties Of Acids And Bases

Swallow an indigestion tablet and something quietly dramatic happens in your stomach. A powder that would do nothing at all in a glass of water goes to work on a liquid strong enough to strip paint, and within a few minutes the burning stops. That rescue is the same event that farmers buy by the lorry load to repair sour fields, that power stations engineer into their chimneys to keep sulfur out of the sky, and that a gardener carries out with a bag of powder and a colour chart. One reaction, four completely different settings.

This lesson gets underneath it. You will find out what a base actually is and why only some bases earn the name alkali, why every acid you meet owes its behaviour to one particular ion, how a strip of paper dipped in a mixture of dyes can report the acidity of a solution in a colour you can read across a room, and why the salt that appears at the end of a neutralisation has one half of its name donated by the acid and the other half by the base. By the end you will be able to look at any acid and any base in the specification, name the product before you mix them, and write the balanced equation that goes with it.