Hey guys. I’m struggling to understand the concept of moles, and was hoping someone could explain it a lot easier than in previous posts. I understand that a mole of something means that there is 6.022 x 10\^23 of that something (similar to the idea of 1 dozen = 12 things), but I don’t quite understand when for example 1 mole of Nitrogen is 14g.
If 1 mole of nitrogen means that there is 6.022 x 10\^23 nitrogen atoms, how does 1 mole of nitrogen equal 14g? Is it saying that 6.022 x 10\^23 nitrogen atoms (1 mole of nitrogen) is equal to 14g, since the mass of a nitrogen atom (single nitrogen atom) would be super small, and so we use moles to convert it into a reasonable mass for easier calculations e.g. 14g?
Hope that wasn’t too confusing :S
Thanks everyone! 🙂
In: Chemistry
Atoms are small. Atoms are really very very small indeed. For any useful quantity of a substance, you need a very large number of atoms to do anything useful. When we started out with chemistry, we didn’t have a good way to measure how small or how much mass a single atom had. To get around the problem of dealing with such tiny things, we came up with the idea of a mole.
A mole is simply a specific large number of a thing. You can have a mole of people, or a mole of cars. Even a [mole of moles](https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/). By careful study of chemistry, we could work out how different elements interact, and so work out how much a mole of each type of element weighs, and other properties about them. In time, as our ability to measure things got better, we became able to actually put a specific numerical value to what a mole is, and got 6.022×10^23 (Avogardro’s number).
Basically a mole is “enough atoms that I have a useful amount of the stuff”.
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