Final answer:
The balloon will shrink when taken from a warm indoor environment to a cold outdoor environment due to the decrease in temperature causing a reduction in the volume of the gas inside the balloon. This exemplifies Charles's Law, part of the ideal gas law, which states that the volume of a gas is directly proportional to its temperature when pressure remains constant.
Step-by-step explanation:
If you blow up a balloon inside your house on a cold winter day and then take the balloon outside, you would expect the balloon to shrink. This happens due to the effect of temperature on the gas inside the balloon. According to the ideal gas law, when a gas is cooled (as it would be when taken from a warmer inside environment to a colder outside environment), its volume decreases if the pressure remains constant. Since the pressure inside and outside the house is essentially the same, this volume change is primarily due to the temperature difference.
The same concept is observed in the experiment where you inflate a balloon at room temperature and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. The balloon shrinks because the cold temperature of the refrigerator slows down the movement of the air molecules inside the balloon, causing a decrease in volume.
In both scenarios, the pressure inside the balloon remains relatively constant while the volume changes due to the temperature difference. This exemplifies the direct relationship between temperature and volume in Charles's Law, which is part of the ideal gas law where V1/T1 = V2/T2 (where V is volume and T is temperature in Kelvin).