One Mole is A Lot of Things 44.org

One Mole is A Lot of Things

modified from Dave Tanis

When working with the mole concept, students often have trouble comprehending the enormous size of Avogadro's number, 6.02 x 1023. The following analogies may be helpful for students.

? If there were a mole of rice grains, all the land area in the whole world would be covered with rice to a depth of about 75 meters.

? One mole of rice grains is more grains than all the grain that has been grown since the beginning of time.

? One mole of rice would occupy a cube about 120 miles on an edge!

? Computers can count at the rate of over 800 million counts per second. At this rate it would take a computer over 25 million years to count to 6.02 x 1023.

? A mole of marshmallows would cover the United States to a depth of 600 miles

? In order to put a mole of rain drops in a 30 meter (about 100 feet) diameter tank, the sides of the tank would have to be 280 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

? A mole of hockey pucks would be equal to the mass of the Moon.

? Assuming that each human being has 60 trillion body cells (6.0 x 1013) and the Earth's population is 6 billion (6 x 109), the total number of living human body cells on the Earth at the present time is 3.6 x 1023or a little over half of a mole.

? If one mole of pennies were divided up among the Earth's population, each person would receive 1 x 1014 pennies. Personal spending at the rate of one million dollars a day would use up each persons wealth in about three thousand years. Life would not be comfortable because the surface of the Earth would be covered in copper coins to a depth of at least 400 meters.

? If you had a mole of pennies and wanted to buy kite string at the rate of a million dollars per inch, you would get your money's worth. After stretching your string around the Earth one million times, and to the Moon and back twenty-five times, you would have enough string left over to sell back at a penny an inch (a decided loss) to gain enough money to buy every man, woman and child in the US a $5000 automobile and enough gasoline to run it at 55 mph for a year. After those purchases, you would still have enough money left over to give every man, woman, and child in the whole world $6136.

Basis for calculations: Earth's circumference = 25,000 miles Cost of gasoline = $1.20 per gallon U.S. population = 220,000,000

Distance to moon = 240,000 miles Gasoline mileage = 20 miles per gallon World population = 6,000,000,000

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