Introduction to the Concept of Acids

 In today's lesson, we are going to consider acids. I know that the first time you heard the word acid, what came into your mind was some dangerous stuff that has the capacity to peel off your skin or cause some kind of damage to your body. That's not completely true! as a matter of fact, there are some acids that you eat almost on a daily basis and they have not killed you yet. They rather see to the nourishment of your body.


Most of us love to consume orange, grape, lemon and other citrus fruits. These foods contain citric acid which is also essential in the body. What we call vitamin C is known in chemistry as ascorbic acid. Proteins are made up of smaller units that we call amino acids. This implies that we eat a lot of acids and we are not dead yet.


The aforementioned ought to change your mindset about acids. Acids are not some dangerous stuff that's looking for how to kill you. While some acids can do that, most of them are actually harmless!


There are two ways that we can clasify acids;

1) Acids can be classified based on how much the molecule can dissociate in water

2) Acids can be classified based on wheather they can be prepared in the laboratory or not.


In the first category, there are two kinds of acids;

1) Strong acids

2) Weak acids


In the second category, we have two kinds of acids;

1) Organic acids

2) Mineral acids


Tomorrow we shall look at each of the classes of acids individually.


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