Salt is necessary for life. Both of these ions are supplied by salt. The taste of salt is one of the fundamental tastes; salt is probably the most ancient flavoring known, and one of the few rocks we eat.
Salt has been used throughout most of written history to flavor and preserve food. There are many different types of salt including pickling salt and kosher salt, but table salt is the kind most used in recipes. Salt is a compound, NaCl, made up of two elements, and table salt contains some additional ingredients. Sodium, or Na, is a soft metallic element, a highly reactive member of the alkali metals. The sodium ion is soluble in water and is responsible for the salty state of the ocean, and the element is essential to sustain human and animal life.
Sodium on its own is dangerous to ingest, as sodium ignites when it comes into contact with water, so the element must be handled carefully. It is a component of many common household compounds, including baking soda, soda ash, borax and table salt. Chlorine, or Cl, is a halogen element, and because of its oxidation powers, is used in many cleaners, bleaches and disinfectants. Chlorine on its own is dangerous to ingest, as it is poisonous. In fact, from a chemistry perspective, the term salt generally describes any substance that is produced by the reaction of a positively charged acid with a negatively charged base.
Some salts occur naturally and are found in seawater. Regardless of their origin, all salts share some common characteristics, including their ionic bonds, crystalline structure as a solid, electrical conductivity when melted or in solution, without forgetting their relatively high melting points.
This brings us to a very important question. Is salt an element? The short answer is no. An example is sodium chloride, which is clearly made up of sodium atom acting as cation and chlorine atom acting as the anion.
Whether occurring naturally or made by the neutralisation process, salt is an incredibly important substance. Each salt has a positive and a negative charge and as such, has the desire to bond. Salt is a chemical compound with a number of interesting properties as you are going to see throughout this text. Stay with me as I expound on this topic and cover some of the important questions you might have about salt.
Salt is one of the most common ingredients used in food production. Most people consume salt every day, either adding it directly to food or consuming it indirectly in processed foods, but what is the science behind it, how is it formed, its characteristics, what are the different kinds?
Read on to find out. As I had mentioned earlier, salt in chemistry refers to a chemical compound that consists of positively and negatively charged ions.
And due to their oppositely charged ions, they are attracted to each other with an electrostatic force of attraction, which is called an ionic bond. This compound has a related number of cations and anions, which makes it electrically neutral without a net charge. In fact, the pH of salt is 7, which means it is neutral in nature; that is, it is neither acidic nor basic.
The element sodium Na has 11 electrons and its electronic configuration is 2, 8, 1, which can also be represented as 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s1. Sodium has to lose one electron for it to achieve a stable configuration.
The element chlorine Cl has a total of 17 electrons and its electronic configuration is 2, 8, 7, which can also be represented as 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p5. Chlorine has to gain one electron to achieve a stable configuration. By combining sodium and chlorine, sodium losses its extra electron to chlorine, allowing both atoms to achieve a stable electron configuration. Sodium is a very reactive metal and on its own, it is dangerous to ingest as it ignites when in contact with water. For instance, it can react with the sweat on your hands to form a very corrosive substance called sodium hydroxide.
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