This series of activities will allow you to investigate acids, bases and salts. You may already know that the pH scale is used to measure the pH of a solution and to determine if it is an acid, base or salt. Acids have pHs below 7, bases have pHs above seven and salts are neutral and have pHs around 7.
Activities have been divided into three sections:
Section 1. In this section, you will test the pH of several solutions in order to classify the inorganic substances as acids, bases or salts.
Section 2. Using the chemical formulas of these solutions and a spreadsheet that you will create, you will find patterns in the formulas of the groups of inorganic compounds (acids, bases, and salts). Using the patterns you find, you will create a set of rules used to classify compounds.
Section 3. Once these rules are created, you will use them to predict the classification of unknown samples when given their chemical formulas. You will evaluate the pattern you identified and used to predict classifications by measuring the pHs of the unknown samples.