Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Me, Myself, and my Favorite Chemical Reaction
As many of you know, I am a swimmer for the MGSH team. As many of you also know, the pools in which we swim contain many chemicals, most to sanitize the water. It would be pretty disgusting if they just filled up the pool with regular water! People spit, pee, sweat, and do all sorts of other things in the water, so as one who regularly dunks themselves into (and sometimes swallows a litttle bit of) pool water, my favorite reaction would have to be the one between Cholrine and H2O. I did some research and the formula I found for this wonderful reaction is Cl2 (chlorine) + H2O (water) ---> HOCl (hypochlorus acid)+ HCl (hydrochloric acid). The hypochloric acid is the nasty stuff! It slashes through cell walls and destroys all the bacteria we leave behind. Chlorine is a highly toxic chemical, but in the small, diluted quantites found in a pool, it has no harmful effect. Thank goodness for chlorine, or being a swimmer would be awful!
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4 comments:
Well yours totally makes sense. Nice job with the equation. Mine was about gunpowder. BECAUSE FIREWORKS ARE AMAZING!!!! So... anyway I didn't know that you swam for the swim team what events do you do?
50 free, 100 free, 200 free, 100 back...The coach tries to mix it up though
Wow... I wouldn't have ever even thought of this for an idea as a reaction:-p
I'm sure as a swimmer, you can really appreciate some nice, maneating germ free water. :-D
I'd also like to point out that chlorine is really only harmful if it's inhaled in its gaseous state.
Don't be setting it to a flame now!
Your post i really good, I never knew that there was a formula for chlorine and water. I figured the chlorine just dissolved into the water and well stayed chlorine and water, separate.
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