BORING EDUCATION — LIVE EXPERIMENTProduct is live. Experiments are running. Feedback is being collected. Improvements are underway.Welcome to Boring Education. We're glad you're here while we're figuring out how to make learning better.
BORINGEDUCATION

1.3Free

Isotopes: why chlorine is 35.453 and not 35

Your guide: Miss SanaCounts atoms the way you count rupees: carefully.

The problem

Your class average in the chemistry test is 67.4. Look down the result sheet: not one student scored 67.4. An average does not have to belong to anyone.

Chlorine works the same way. Dalton thought all atoms of an element were identical, even in mass. They are not. Chlorine atoms come in two masses, and 35.453 is their average.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element with the same atomic number but different atomic masses. They have the same number of protons and electrons but different numbers of neutrons, so their chemical properties are the same.

Step 1 / 7