Question

12.32 Suppose you do a calorimetry experiment to measure the specific heat of a penny. You take a number of pennies, measure their mass, heat them to a known temperature, and then drop them into a container of water at a known temperature. You then deduce the specific heat of a penny by measuring the temperature change of water. unfortunately you didn't realize that you dropped one penny on the floor while transferring them to the water. This will-

A. Cause you to underestimate the specific heat. B> Cause you to overestimate the specific heat
C. Not affect your calculation of specific heat

Answer 1

Dropping one penny while transferring heated pennies into water for calorimetry will lead to an overestimation of the specific heat because the missing penny's heat is not transferred to the water, yet the original mass is used in calculations.

Step-by-step explanation:

If you accidentally drop one penny on the floor while transferring heated pennies into water for a calorimetry experiment, it would cause you to overestimate the specific heat of the pennies. This is because specific heat is calculated based on the assumption of all the known mass of the heated substance (pennies in this case) transferring heat to the water. If one penny is missing, the total heat transferred to the water will be less since one source of heat (the dropped penny) did not contribute to the water's temperature change. However, if you unknowingly use the original mass for your calculations, you'll end up attributing the observed temperature change of water to fewer pennies, failing to account for the missing penny. Accordingly, this would result in a higher computed specific heat value as you mistakenly conclude that a lesser amount of pennies absorbed the same amount of heat that would have been absorbed by the greater number of pennies.