CONCLUSION When you put an egg in vinegar, we see that the shell dissolves, but do you ever wonder why? An egg is made mostly out of calcium carbonate which reacts with an ingredient in vinegar, acetic acid. Acetic acid is about 4% of the vinegar and what breaks apart the solid calcium carbonate crystals. The bubbles we see, from the egg, is the carbonate that make carbon dioxide and the other calcium ions float free. This is the equation: CaCO3 (s) + 2 HC2H3O2 (aq) → Ca(C2H3O2)2 (aq) + H2O (l) + CO2 (g) In the vinegar, the egg's mass also increased because the vinegar is hypotonic to the solution in the egg, causing water to diffuse into the cell of the egg. This allows the egg to increase in size while the shell dissolves from off the …show more content…
Think of it like this, adding salt to the water makes it like an ocean which is easier to float and swim in than just normal/ distilled water. This is because salt makes water denser. When salt water gets denser, the easier it would be for objects to float on it. My hypothesis was correct. The water did go inside the egg, but the ones with least salt increased the most, unless the egg was the smallest and it had enough space to take in a lot of extra water. When the concentration of the salt was increased, the amount of water decrease and it is the same the other way around. The mass of the egg will increase if the amount of water is more than the concentration of the salt water and all of this happens because of osmosis. This motion will cause the water to continue moving back and forth across the membrane to create and equilibrium, with equal concentrations on both …show more content…
An egg naturally has a lot of stuff inside, so the outside solution has to be very concentrated for this to happen. That’s the case when an egg is treated with corn syrup or buried in salt. By contrast, when an egg is treated with distilled water, or a dilute salt solution, the solute concentration is higher inside the egg than out, so the water moves into the egg, increasing its mass. It may be easier to think about osmosis in terms of water concentration rather than solute concentration. If the solute concentration is high, then the water concentration will be low by comparison. Rubbing, or isopropyl, alcohol is at least 70% alcohol and therefore less than 30% water. This should cause water to move from the egg into the solution, and the egg should lose mass. In addition, the egg may appear white and