Table of Contents

• Prequiz...
• 1: What is a mole?
• 2: How much does a mole weigh?
• 3: Molar weights made easy
• 4: ...but not quite that easy
• 5: Using the Periodic Table
• 6: Water
• 7: Practice with sulfuric acid
• 8: ...and caffeine
• 9: Going backwards
• 10: ...and rubies
• 11: Summary

Learning Outcomes

After completing this module, you should be able to:

• understand what a ‘mole’ is and what it measures
• understand the information available from a periodic table and use it to calculate the weight of 1 mole of any given chemical compound

What is a mole?

No, but moles are fascinating animals – they eat 50% of their weight in worms daily and scent-mark their tunnels.

No, this is chicken mole. Yummy, but no cigar.

Yes, these bars each represent 1 mole of a particular metal – copper, iron, zinc, or aluminium.

 

To be a little more exact, a mol is approximately 6.022 × 10²³ atoms or molecules. The unit of mole is ‘mol’. A mol is not a measure of WEIGHT – rather, it is a measure of NUMBER, similar to a “dozen”. You can have a dozen eggs, and that would weigh about 600 grams. A dozen donuts would weigh about 700 grams, and a dozen cornflakes would weigh about 6 grams. So,

1 dozen = 12 of something

1 mol = 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 of something