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Small piece of zinc metal is placed into copper sulfate solution, after a couple

ID: 781674 • Letter: S

Question

Small piece of zinc metal is placed into copper sulfate solution, after a couple of minutes the zinc metal is connected to the positive post of a 9v battery through the use of a jumper cable, a piece of pencil lead is connected to the negative post of the battery through the use of a seperate jumper cable.They are both placed into the copper sulfate without touching. Really trying to develop an understanding of what is going on in this reaction so clearest explanation with chemical equation to illustrate after a couple of hours gets top answer. Thanks in advance.

Explanation / Answer

Here it goes a typical single replacement reaction where an element higher on the electromotive scale ( more reactive ) will displace the another element from a salt in solution.
As we can see here in this case Zn metal ( Zn(0) ) will displace the lesser active copper from its salt.
and the reaction goes like this
CuSO4 + Zn ( 0) ------- ZnSO4 + Cu(0)
and the reaction will go VERY far to the right since the Cu(0) has extremely low solubility and will precipitate moving the reaction to the right.

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