Question

You have a 50.0g samples of silver, a 50g sample of iron, and a 50g sample of water. You add 100 J of energy to each sample. Which substance will have the largest resulting temperature change? Which substance will have the smallest temperature change?

Answer 1

Silver.

Step-by-step explanation:

Hello!

In this case, we can consider the specific heat as the property that we can analyze in order to answer to this question. In such a way, as the specific heat is known as the energy required to modify the temperature of 1 g of the substance by 1 °C, since the masses of all the substances are the same, we can that their specific heats are respectively 0.240, 0.444 and 4.184 J/(g°C), from the equation:

`Q=mCp\Delta T`

We can see that the higher the specific heat (Cp) the lower the change in temperature considering their inversely proportional relationship. However, as 100 J of energy is applied to all the substances, we can see that silver will exhibit the largest temperature change because a higher change is needed to fit with the provided energy.

Best regards.