Answer :
Final answer:
The empirical formula of a compound with 60 percent carbon, 4.48 percent hydrogen, and 35.5 percent oxygen is C2H2O, which is determined by converting the percentages into moles and finding the smallest whole-number ratios.
Explanation:
The empirical formula of a compound gives the simplest ratio of the types of atoms in the compound. To find the empirical formula for a compound with 60 percent carbon, 4.48 percent hydrogen, and 35.5 percent oxygen, we first assume we have 100 grams of the compound. This means we have 60g of carbon, 4.48 g of hydrogen, and 35.5 g of oxygen.
Next, we convert these amounts from grams to moles by dividing by the atomic mass of each element (approximately 12.01 g for carbon, 1.01 g for hydrogen, and 16.00 g for oxygen).
Here, we have 5 moles of carbon (60/12.01), 4.43 moles of hydrogen (4.48/1.01) and 2.22 moles of oxygen (35.5/16.00). The smallest molar amount is 2.22 (for oxygen), so we divide each molar amount by 2.22 to get the smallest whole-number multiples. Thus, the empirical formula works out to be C2H2O.
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