Colligative Properties and Snow

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Performance Task Essay When living in a cold environment, such as Canada, there are many injuries due to hazardous ice around the area. Colligative Properties lessen the amount of injuries that occur while pedestrians are walking or driving on the streets. Living in an area, such as Canada, one might have experienced salt on the roads and sidewalks. The reason for the use of the salt is to melt and keep the ice and snow from refreezing, thus making the streets a safer environment for the average citizen. The salt lowers the freezing point of the water/ice. This effect is called freezing point depression. Adding the salt to the ice will result in the melting of the ice by introducing dissolved foreign particles to it. The freezing point lowers as more particles are added until the salt stops dissolving. A latent heat of fusion will occur when the salt is introduced to he ice which will produce heat from the water changing phases also adding to the melting, and will keep the water in a liquid state. As stated in the previous paragraph, the more particles of salt, the more melting of the ice. The salt solution has a good amount of particles to melt the ice and make the streets safer. This is all because of the amount of moles of dissolved particles that the salt has. One may ask, “why not use sugar instead of salt?” There is a perfectly good explanation to that. We use salt to melt the snow and ice instead of sugar because salt solutions have more moles of dissolved particles than sugar solutions do, which equals more melting. One gram of NaCl solution (salt solution) has about six times more moles of dissolved particles than a sucrose solution (sugar solution). Another reason people use salt to melt snow and ice instead of sugar is that NaCl particles have two separate ions, when sucrose (sugar) is one molecule. This makes the effect on the freezing point less

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