CHEMICAL EQUAL AL EQUATIONS
Activity 1.1
can be described as – when a magnesium ribbon is burnt in
oxygen, it gets converted to magnesium oxide. This description of a chemical
reaction in sentence form is quite long. It can be written in a shorter form.
The simplest way to do this is to write it in the form of a word-equation.
The word-equation for the above reaction would be –
Magnesium
+ Oxygen → Magnesium oxide
1.1.1 Writing a Chemical Equation
Is there any other shorter way for representing chemical equations? Chemical equations can be made more concise and useful if we use chemical formulae instead of words. A chemical equation represents a chemical reaction. If you recall formulae of magnesium, oxygen and magnesium oxide, the above word-equation can be written as –
