The short answer is yes, hydrochloric acid will always be 1 on the pH scale if you have it in any real concentration. These acid test kits are generally found in solvents and it gets tricky because solvents can’t have a pH because there is no water. So you’ve got a pure solvent you can’t have a ph. What you’re doing with those acid kits is actually extracting the acid out of a solvent and into an aqueous solution and then measuring the pH of that aqueous solution. You’re normally getting such a dilute amount of acid that’s been extracted that you’re measuring a much smaller amount of pH so you don’t have a very high concentration of hydrochloric acid. That’s when a good chemical supplier will design the kit to get extra drops of booster and correlate those booster numbers into how much booster you should add into your machine.