Question

Imagine yourself making a nice cup of tea on a cold winter day. You begin by boiling some water in a kettle. Next, you add the steaming liquid to your cup. Then, you open a tea bag and repeatedly dunk it into the water. You pour a dash of milk and drop a few sugar cubes into the cup, stirring the solution with a spoon. Finally, you squeeze a bit of lemon into your tea mixture. However, before you have time to stir the lemon juice into your tea, the liquid forms clumps. In other words, your tea has curdled!

Name some of the chemical substances in the tea mixture.
Which chemicals could have reacted to cause the curdling?

Answer 1

The curdled was formed because the lemon´s citric acid reacts with the milk´s protein called casein

Step-by-step explanation:

In the tea mixture we can found out many chemical substances like:

+citric acid =lemon

+H2O= hot water

+proteins (Casein), fat, sugars= milk

+saccharose= sugar

When mixing citric acid with casein, it reacts by changing the negative charges of the casein to neutral charges, starting to clump together, as you can see in the image below. The reaction comes faster if the medium is hot. Eventually, a curdled has been formed in the solution.