Student Solutions Manual for Whitten’s Chemistry 10th

Book Preface

Foreword to the Students

This Solutions Manual supplements the textbook, General Chemistry, tenth edition, by Kenneth W. Whitten, Raymond E. Davis, M. Larry Peck and George Stanley. The solutions of the 1441 even-numbered problems at the end of the chapters have been worked out in a detailed, step-by-step fashion.
Your learning of chemistry serves two purposes: (1) to accumulate fundamental knowledge in chemistry which you will use to understand the world around you, and (2) to enhance your ability to make logical deductions in science. This ability comes when you know how to reason in a scientific way and how to perform the mathematical manipulations necessary for solving certain problems. The excellent textbook by Whitten, Davis, Peck and Stanley provides you with a wealth of chemical knowledge, accompanied by good solid examples of logical scientific deductive reasoning. The problems at the end of the chapters are a review, a practice and, in some cases, a challenge to your scientific problem-solving abilities. It is the fundamental spirit of this Solutions Manual to help you to understand the scientific deductive process involved in each problem.
In this manual, I provide you with a solution and an answer to the numerical problems, but the emphasis lies on providing the step-by-step reasoning behind the mathematical manipulations. In some cases, I present as many as three different approaches to solve the same problem, since we understand that each of you has your own unique learning style. In stoichiometry as well as in many other types of calculations, the “unit factor” method is universally emphasized in general chemistry textbooks. I think that the over-emphasis of this method may train you to regard chemistry problems as being simply mathematical manipulations in which the only objective is to cancel units and get the answer. My goal is for you to understand the principles behind the calculations and hopefully to visualize with your mind’s eye the chemical processes and the experimental techniques occurring as the problem is being worked out on paper. And so I have dissected the “unit factor” method for you and introduced chemical meaning into each of the steps.
I gratefully acknowledge the tremendous help over the years provided by Frank Kolar in the preparation of this manuscript.
Wendy L. Keeney-Kennicutt
Department of Chemistry
Texas A&M University