Question

Select the correct answer.

Kylie places a cube of metal A and a cube of metal B in two separate beakers of water. Then she heats the beakers. She keeps the mass of metal, the amount of water, and the amount of heat the same. At the end of her experiment, she finds that metal A has a lower temperature than metal B. What can she conclude about the thermal properties of the two metals?

Metal B is a better conductor than metal A.
Metal A is a better conductor than metal B.
Metal A has a higher heat capacity than metal B.
Metal B has a higher heat capacity than metal A.

Answer 1

Metal A has a higher heat capacity than Metal B.

Step-by-step explanation:

To answer this question, we have to think about what happened and what we know about thermal properties of metals. We are talking about temperature and heat in this question, so we can already eliminate both answers that talk about the metals being a conductor, because conductivity is related to electricity. That's not what the question asks. So therefore, we know one metal must have a higher heat capacity than the other. Heat capacity is defined as the number of heat units needed to raise temperature by one degree. If metal A has a lower temperature than metal B, it must have a higher heat capacity, because it takes more heat to raise the temperature. This is because metal B has a higher temperature than metal A. Therefore, the correct answer is Metal A has a higher heat capacity than Metal B.