ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by medicinal chemistry.

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If you can’t helium, and you can’t curium, you’ll just have to barium [Two guys on a table entertaining people in a restaurant]

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Here’s our question…

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Which of the following is true regarding solids?

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And here are our potential answers…

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Let's start at the top with (A).

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(A) just means that all the stuff in a solid is in a very small space.

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Does that seem true?

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Well, if you’ve ever vaporized anything in the microwave, let’s say a grape, you [A microwave and a bunch of grapes appear]

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probably know that if you put a solid object in and heat it to make a gas or a plasma,

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it will often expand to fill the microwave. [Microwave explodes and grapes hit a man in the face]

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Not that…we've tried this before….ahem.

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Anyway, it seems like A might be a reasonable choice, so we'll come back to it. [Car drives down a road]

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The next answer says that solids have the highest average kinetic energy relative to

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liquids and gases.

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Average kinetic energy is what temperature measures. [Thermometer gauge rising]

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A high temperature means a high average kinetic energy, and a low temperature means a low

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average kinetic energy.

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This means the question is actually asking us if solids are generally hotter than liquids [A log of wood, rain and gas]

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and gases.

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Although having gas is not hot when you’re on a date, gases themselves are the hottest [Man farts walking through a park with a girl]

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state of matter on average.

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Temperature-wise.

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We don’t know how they fare in online dating… [Mobile phone with a Tinder picture of a gas]

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Solids are colder than both liquids and gases in fact, so we can cross off choice B right away.

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Let’s move on to answer C, which says that the particles are in a randomly assorted 3D

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structure, brought to you by Oculus [An oculus rift AI headset]

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As much as your Lego kit at home may be in disarray, the atoms within each Lego piece [Boy surrounded by lego pieces]

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should be arranged fairly regularly compared to a liquid or a gas….unless you’ve run

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your Legos through a particle accelerator. [Pieces of lego shooting through a particle accelerator]

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Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t.

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…Don't try that at home either.

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So answer C is off the table.

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Moving on to answer D. [Car drives past a sign labelled 'D']

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This next statement says that solids have a definite volume from an indefinite shape.

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If you take a sugar cube as an example, you can see that a solid has a very definite volume

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as well as a definite shape. [A sugar cube in a kitchen]

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if you pound the cube into dust, it still has a definite shape. [Hammer smashes sugar cube to dust]

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It’s just gone from a cube to an amorphous pile of dust that has no geometric name.

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So answer D is off the table because indefinite shape does not describe solids.

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That leaves us with our original answer A, that solids constitute a condensed state of

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matter.

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So it looks like nothing was the matter with answer A… [Guys cheering in a pub]

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…We'll see ourselves out.

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