I’ve asked this question to multiple teachers and googled it multiple times only to hear “yeah if you put a catalyst in a chemical it reacts faster” but I want to know what the catalyst actually does to do this
In: Chemistry
Have you ever seen videos of people putting things together in a factory or something, and they have a jig to make sure the parts are lined up? You could have put the parts together with just your hands, but they’d be all over the room and in random orientations, so it would take longer to get them to fit. If you slot them into this jig, they’ll be lined up perfectly and it’ll take you less energy to add the glue or the screws or whatever completes the assembly. When you remove the completed article, the jig is not used up and can help speed up the next one.
Enzymes in particular are designed to have just the right shape to receive the two components of a reaction that would have been floating around randomly and unlikely to react (or one component to be split up). You slot the pieces in, they get joined while they’re in the right orientation, then they get released and the enzyme is ready to receive another one.
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