Add a different food coloring to the alcohol in the other beaker and gently pour it onto the plastic wrap in the large beaker. Very gently remove the plastic wrap and the alcohol will sit on top of the water. You can drop an ice cube into the mixture again and watch where it floats. This property is an intrinsic property to each particular substance. This means that it is a property of the substance and depends on the type of material as opposed to the amount.
Extrinsic properties depend on the amount of the material.
Some examples of other intrinsic properties include color, melting point, freezing point, and boiling point. Extrinsic properties include volume, mass, and temperature. This activity will help students differentiate between extrinsic properties such as volume or mass alone and intrinsic ones such as density. Because density is intrinsic, as you add more and more of a substance to the sample, the density does not change. The volume and the mass both change as you add more to a sample.