Video Transcript
The word equation for a chemical
reaction is shown below. Zinc plus hydrochloric acid reacts
to form zinc chloride plus hydrogen. What are the reactants in this
reaction?
In order to solve this question,
let us first review the arrangement of a word equation. The reactants in a word equation
are the chemicals our reaction starts with and are located on the left-hand side of
a word equation. An arrow is used to separate the
reactants from the chemicals that are formed during the reaction, which are called
the products.
Now let us take a look at the word
equation given in this problem and correctly identify the location of the reactants,
which would be given on the left-hand side. We now know that zinc and
hydrochloric acid are the reactants, whereas the chemicals to the right of the arrow
are the products, which are zinc chloride and hydrogen. Therefore, the reactants in this
reaction are zinc and hydrochloric acid. The correct answer is zinc and
hydrochloric acid.
