Question

Black coffee has a pH around 5; hand soap has a pH of 10. How many times more acidic is coffee relative

to hand soap?

Answer 1

`\boxed {\boxed {\sf 10^5 \ or \ 100,000 \ times \ more \ acidic}}`

Step-by-step explanation:

The pH scale stands for the power or potential of hydrogen. It measures how acidic or basic a solution based on the concentration of hydrogen ions and a scale from 1 to 14.

This scale is unique because it is logarithmic. So, every time the pH changes by 1 on the scale, the actual concentration of the solution increases or decreases by a tenfold.

So, a solution with a pH of 7 is ten times more acidic than a solution with a pH of 8. This can be translated to:

`10^ {difference \ in \ pH}`

The black coffee has a pH of 5 and the hand soap has a pH of 10. We want to find how many times more acidic coffee is, so we subtract 5 from 10 and get 5. The difference in pH is 5.

`10^5=100,000`

Coffee is 10⁵ or 100,000 times more acidic than hand soap.