Can some one explain in detail how to write chemical formulas for these problems?- middle school science?
This is pretty hard for middle school! But as my Chemistry teacher liked to say, Chem is try (get it? chemistry) Anyways…. -ide is a suffix that means negatively charged, aka has space for taking on positively charged ions. What comes before the suffix is the chemical that is negatively charged. In your case oxygen, sulfur, fluorine, and nitrogen. A *general* rule is that the very last column (starting with He, Ne, etc) has 0 negative charges. The 2nd to last column (starting with F, Cl, etc) has one negative charge. This goes on backwards till you go 4 (or is it 5?) columns backwards. A similar *general* rule is that the first column (starting with H, Li, etc) has one extra positive charge. The second column has 2, and so on. So lithium oxide, for example, has lithium (one positive charge) and oxygen has 2 negative charges. You want the total charge to be zero. So you need 2 lithiums (+1 x 2 = 2) for your one oxygen (-2 x 1 = -2) to get zero (+2 + -2 = 0). So the way that you would
