Suggested Activities for Students Regarding this Unit

These are hands-on activities the NCERT textbook suggests so you can see equilibrium ideas from this unit at work outside the equations, using nothing more than pH paper, common kitchen/lab solutions, and (if your school has one) a pH meter.

1. Survey the pH of everyday liquids. Use pH paper to test fresh juices squeezed from various vegetables and fruits, soft drinks, body fluids, and any water samples you have access to. Comparing the readings is a quick way to build intuition for where common substances sit on the pH scale (Section 6.11.2).
2. Classify salts by the acid/base that formed them. pH paper can also be used on solutions of different salts. From whether a salt solution reads acidic, basic, or neutral, you can work out whether it was formed from a strong or weak acid and a strong or weak base — this is exactly the salt hydrolysis idea from Section 6.11.9.
3. Make your own buffer and check it holds its pH. Mix solutions of sodium acetate and acetic acid in different proportions and measure the pH of each mixture with pH paper. This is the buffer-solution idea from Section 6.12 in practice — a mixture of a weak acid and its conjugate base resists pH change.
4. Watch indicators change colour across the pH range. Take a set of different acid-base indicators and observe the colour each one shows in solutions of varying pH. This builds a feel for why a particular indicator is chosen for a particular titration.
5. Run some acid-base titrations using indicators. Put the indicators from (d) to use in real titrations, watching for the colour change at the endpoint. …