CHEMICAL EQUATIONS

Activity 1.1 can be described as – when a magnesium ribbon is burnt in oxygen, it gets converted to magnesium oxide. This description of a chemical reaction in a sentence form is quite long. It can be written in a shorter form. The simplest way to do this is to write it in the form of a word-equation.

The word-equation for the above reaction would be –

The substances that undergo chemical change in the reaction (1. 1), magnesium and oxygen, are the reactants. The new substance, magnesium oxide, formed during the reaction, is the product.

A word-equation shows change of reactants to products through an arrow placed between them. The reactants are written on the left-hand side (LHS) with a plus sign (+) between them. Similarly, products are written on the right-hand side (RHS) with a plus sign (+) between them. The arrowhead points towards the products, and shows the direction of the reaction.