CHEMISTRY COMMUNITY

When you divide the molar mass of the molecular formula by the molar mass of the empirical formula, if i get 3.5, do i multiply by 4 or 3?

You multiply by the smallest possible value; that will give you a whole number.

If you are at 3.5, you can multiply by 2 to get 7! Hope this helps.

In these problems, you always want to make sure you are multiplying by a whole number to ensure you have whole numbers of atoms.

You would multiple all the coefficients by 7, since you can't have 3.5 as a coefficient. You can't use 3 or 4 because that wouldn't uphold the exact proportion of 3.5.

You want to make sure all the stoichiometric coefficients are whole numbers. So if you have 3.5, you will most likely multiply all of the coefficients by 2 or a multiple of 2 to ensure whole numbers.

You want to multiply by the smallest possible number that will give you a whole number. I would multiply 3.5 by 2 to get 7.

You need to multiple the answer by the smallest possible number which would turn the answer to a whole number. For example, if your answer is 1.33, you will have to multiply it by 3 to get 4.

Always multiply by the smallest number possible to get a whole number. In this case it sounds like you would multiply by 2 so that the 3.5 would turn into 7, a whole number.

If you get a number like 3.5, multiply everything by 2 to get the whole number of 7 (this will be your subscript for the element in the molecular formula)