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Rate of Reaction

Definition

The rate of reaction refers to how quickly reactants turn into products in a chemical reaction.

Analogy

Imagine baking cookies - your ingredients are your reactants and your finished cookies are your products. The rate at which you can turn those ingredients into cookies (maybe you're super fast or maybe it takes you all day) is similar to the rate of reaction in chemistry.

Related terms

Rate Law: An equation that relates reaction rate with concentrations or pressures of reactants and constant parameters (normally rate coefficients). It’s like having a recipe for how fast you can bake those cookies based on how much flour, sugar etc., you have on hand.

Order Of Reaction: This term describes how changing one species' concentration affects overall reaction speed. Like if adding more chocolate chips makes cookie baking go faster, then we'd say it has high order in the reaction.

Half-Life: The time required for a quantity to reduce to half its initial value. It's like if you started eating your cookies and noticed that every hour, about half of them were gone.



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© 2024 Fiveable Inc. All rights reserved.

AP® and SAT® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse this website.