Strong Acid Deprotonation (Textbook J.11)

[Nancy Li 1C]

When we talk about the deprotonation of strong acids, do we assume they COMPLETELY dissociate in water? For the textbook question J.11, where it asks which image best represents a solution of HCl, the correct answer is the one where the ions are completely dissociated (answer b). However, according to the textbook, it says that "completely deprotonated means that ALMOST every acid molecule or ion has lost its acidic hydrogen atom" so I don't understand why the answer wouldn't be choice d (mostly dissociated ions except for one HCl molecule).

[Dana Sorensen 1C]

Perhaps the scale of completely disassociated atoms versus whole HCl molecules is so huge that in the image the amount of whole HCl molecules would be rounded down to zero so the correct image would have none.

[Christine Lin 1H]

I think textbook says that "completely deprotonated" means that almost every acid molecule or ion has lost its acidic hydrogen atom, emphasizing the "every" with italics.

Like Dana said, it might be more of a depiction issue. The picture shows the ionization of only 5 HCl molecules. Since one of them did not dissociate, we can think that only 80% (4/5) of the HCl molecules dissociate, thus does not correctly represent the dissociation of HCl as a strong acid.

Let me know what you think.