Question #f7898

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Sidharth
Feb 7, 2015

Sodium is an alkali metal and is very soft and can cut through knife while iron is a transition metal which is very hard and requires great energy to break apart.Iron is hard, tough and strong compared with sodium because of the strong metallic atom-atom bonding.The strong attractive force between the atoms is only weakened at high temperatures; hence iron has the high melting points and boiling points.This strong bonding between atoms holding them together in iron gives it high density. For example: iron has a density of #7.9 g/(cm)^3 #and sodium has a density of #0.97 g/(cm)^3# (less than water hence floats on water)</p>

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