Okay, so now I want you to imagine a room full of ping pong balls that can bounce all by themselves. They go zipping all over the place all on their own. Now take those ping pong balls and add energy to them so now they bounce twice as fast. Got it?
Now what happens if we take away energy from them? Do they bounce slower? Yup!
Okay, now get them back to their original bouncing speed. Now take the room and make it smaller, like half it’s size, but keep the ping pong ball speed the same. Do they hit the walls more or less frequently? More! Are they speeding up or slowing down? Speeding up!
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Now take the room and expand it ten times it’s normal size. Do the balls hit the walls more or less now? Less! Do they still have the same speed? No, they should be slowing down, too.
So those ping pong balls are molecules, and when you add energy, you’re increasing the temperature so they fly around faster. When you increase the temperature, the molecules zip around faster and faster.
Dalton’s Law of partial pressures is related to the Ideal Gas law. Dalton’s Law states that in a mixture of non-reacting gases, like air, for example, the total pressure exerted is the sum of the partial pressures of each of the individual pressures. For air, you would simply sum up all the partial pressures of each of the individual gases of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, and water vapor to get the total air pressure.
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