Tricks for identifying Strong/Weak Acids & Bases

[Lauren Ho 2E]

Does anyone know of any tips or tricks that will allow you immediately to identify an acid or base as weak or strong?

[Kate Chow 4H]

If you know Ka or Kb, you can determine the strength of an acid or base. But if you don't, there's a short list that you can memorize or know pretty well. For example, most all of the strong bases use the elements in the first 2 columns of the periodic table.

[mbaker4E]

These are some general strong acids/bases I memorized:
Strong Acids - HCl, HBr, HI, HNO3, HClO3, HClO4, H2SO4
Strong Bases - LiOH, NaOH, KOH, RbOH, CsOH, Ca(OH)2, Ba(OH)2, Sr(OH)2

[Casandra]

Does anyone know of any tips or tricks that will allow you immediately to identify an acid or base as weak or strong?

For strong bases and strong acids, it would help to memorize the list of strong acids and bases, because then you know anything that is not a strong base or acid, has to be weak. Also side note, for the most part any base that does not gave OH is weak

[Sarah_Kang_2K]

For Test 1, what should we know about the pH of weak acids and weak bases and its salt? We didn't go over this in discussion. Do we just need to know how to calculate it?

[Ethan Baurle 1A]

Anytime we are given a Ka or Kb, the acid or base is almost certainly going to be weak. This is because the Ka or Kb of a strong acid or base is extremely high because the substance gets basically completely deprotonated/protonated. This should help you in identifying weak substances right away, and then you can either memorize strong ones or the problem may indicate it is a strong substance in some way.