Question #0de88
2 Answers
Your weakest acid will be hypochlorous acid,
When dealing with weak acids, all you really need to do in order to have an idea about their relative strength is look at the magnitude of the acid dissociation constant,
The acid dissociation constant tells you how many molecules of a particular acid will ionize in aqueous solution. A very small
For a generic weka acid dissociation, you have
By definition, the acid dissociation constant is
If this value is very small, then that means that the concentration of the weak acid,
So, in order to determine the weakest acid given, look for the smallest
The pKa is simply the negative logarithm of the acid dissociation constant.
In the case of hypochlorous acid, you get
The weakest conjugate base will belong to the strongest of the acids. The strongest of these weak acids will have the greatest degree of ionization, which implies that it will have the biggest
In your case, the biggest
In order to determine the conjugate base's
In your case, the
Thus, the
a. The weakest acid is therefore quite clearly
b. The weakest conjugate base is clearly the counterion of the strongest acid. Because
If you need clarification or if I've made an error let me know.