HON CHEMISTRY: Now that you know how to write chemical formulas, you are going to be amazed at what you can do with them! I love the way you are able to think through what you know and what you need to find a solution. Today you are going to use that to find empirical formulas and molecular formulas all by yourself – well, almost by yourself. 🙂
Be sure and practice – if you don’t it’ll get all turned around and you’ll end up leaving off an important step. The hardest part is that it’s not a set formula for you to plug and play, but if you’ll keep in mind that you’re really just looking for subscripts which are just moles, you’ll be able to think it through. Percent to mass, mass to moles, moles to smallest whole number ratio.
Are you starting to catch on to the steps? It will be good for you to memorize them, but would it not be just tons better to understand why you need each step – backwards and forwards, so then you wouldn’t need to memorize them at all!
And then, also remember what molecular formulas are – just a multiple of the empirical formula. Keep that concept in mind, and you’ll have no problem remembering to divide the molecular formula mass by the empirical formula mass to find X! Easy peasy! 🙂