Q.The concentration of hydrogen ion in a sample of soft drink is 3.8 × 10⁻³ M. What is its pH?

Hydrogen Ion Concentration and pH

Imagine you have a glass of pure water. It looks simple, but inside, a tiny fraction of water molecules are constantly splitting apart and re-forming. This splitting creates two kinds of charged particles: a hydrogen ion ($H^+$) and a hydroxide ion ($OH^-$). In pure water, these two are perfectly balanced — there are exactly as many $H^+$ as $OH^-$.

Now, if you add something like lemon juice (an acid), you increase the number of hydrogen ions. The balance tips: more $H^+$ than $OH^-$. If you add baking soda (a base), you decrease $H^+$ or increase $OH^-$, and the balance tips the other way.

The question is: how do we measure this imbalance in a simple, practical way? The numbers of $H^+$ ions are incredibly tiny — in pure water, only about 1 in every 10 million water molecules is split at any moment. Writing these numbers directly (like $0.0000001$ moles per litre) is clumsy. That's where pH comes in.

The Precise Definition

pH is a mathematical shortcut. It stands for "power of hydrogen" (from the French puissance d'hydrogène).

The logarithm base 10 does two things at once:

• It compresses a huge range of numbers (from $10^{-14}$ to $10^{0}$) into a manageable scale of 0 to 14.
• The negative sign flips the direction: higher $[H^+]$ gives a lower pH, and lower $[H^+]$ gives a higher pH.

What the Numbers Mean

Notice the pattern: each step of 1 in pH means a tenfold change in $[H^+]$. A solution of pH 3 has 10 times more $H^+$ than pH 4, and 100 times more than pH 5.

The Key Insight

pH is not a measure of "how acidic" something is in a vague sense — it is a precise, logarithmic measure of the actual number of hydrogen ions present. The scale runs from 0 (most acidic, highest $[H^+]$) to 14 (most basic, lowest $[H^+]$), with 7 being neutral. …