Chemistry Notes

1. Get yourself an unbalanced equation. Here's where you use your knowledge of formulas to help you out. If you know what the formula of sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, sodium sulfate, and water are, you'd be able to write the following unbalanced equation:

2. Draw boxes around all the chemical formulas. This is the step that people frequently don't do because they feel that it's a stupid thing to do. Those people are morons. Ignore them. You're drawing those boxes so that you'll be sure not to mess around with the formulas to balance the equation. While they all suffer in the pits of academic hell, you'll be laughing from the honor roll. Here's what the equation looks like:

3. Make an element inventory. In this inventory, your job is to figure out how many atoms of each element you have on the left and right sides of the equation. Now, if you look at the equation, you should be able to see that on the left side of the equation there is one sodium atom, five oxygen atoms (one from the sodium hydroxide, four from the sulfuric acid), three hydrogen atoms (one from the sodium hydroxide, two from the sulfuric acid), and one sulfur atom. On the right side of the equation, there are two atoms of sodium, one atom of sulfur, five atoms of oxygen (four from the sodium sulfate and one from the water), and two atoms of hydrogen. Thus, your element inventory should look like this:

4. Write numbers in front of each of the boxes until the inventory for each element is the same both before and after the reaction. Now, what happens when we put a number in front of a formula? Basically, anything in that box is multiplied by that number, because we're saying that we have that many of that kind of molecule. So, looking at the inventory, what should we do?
Well, we can see that on the left side of the inventory, there is one atom of sodium and on the right there are two. The solution: Stick a "2" in front of the sodium hydroxide on the left side of the equation so that the numbers of sodium atoms are the same on both sides of the equation. When we do this, the new atom inventory should look like this: (I'll let you figure out how this is done)

Now what? Well, looking at the new inventory, we can see that we now have two sodium atoms on both the left and the right sides, but the others still don't match up. What to do?
You can see from the inventory that on the right side of the equation, there are two hydrogen atoms and on the left there are four. Using your amazing powers of mathematics (and hopefully not needing to use a calculator), you can see that two multiplied by the number two becomes four. That's what you need to do. How? Put a "2" in front of the water on the right side of the equation to make the hydrogens balance out. Now that this is done, you should make a new inventory that looks something like this:

Since both sides of the inventory match, the equation is now balanced!  All other equations will balance in exactly the same way, though it might take a few more steps in some cases.