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

1.2Free

Relative atomic mass: weighing atoms against carbon

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

The problem

A hydrogen atom weighs about 1.67 × 10−27 kg. Written out, that is 26 zeros after the decimal point before the first digit. No balance on Earth can read that.

Your mother doesn't weigh rice for the pot in grams. She says “two cups”. The cup is her reference, and everyone in the kitchen understands it.

Chemists picked a cup too: one carbon-12 atom, fixed at exactly 12. Every other atom is weighed against it. That comparison is the relative atomic mass.

Relative atomic mass is the mass of an atom compared with a carbon atom taken as 12. Its unit, the atomic mass unit (amu), is 1/12 of the mass of one carbon-12 atom: 1 amu = 1.661 × 10−27 kg.

Step 1 / 7