Problem: Thomas and Alexander are freshman students in an introductory chemistry laboratory course at their local college. In this week's experiment, both Thomas and Alexander will be starting their experiments with liquid water. They both follow different experimental protocols, and at the end of the experiment Thomas discovers ice in his reaction flask, while Alexander discovers steam in his reaction flask. Given the paragraph above, please answer correctly the following question: Which person created a substance with particles that have more distance between them than they did originally? Hint: As Figure above shows, the distance between particles is much smaller for the solid and liquid states than for the gas state. In the solid state, particles are fixed in place, while particles are more free to move in the liquid and gas states. The particles in the solid and liquid states "stick together," but in the gas state, they move freely about the container. In general, it requires energy to separate individual particles. If we want to make a solid adopt a liquid form, we can add energy in the form of heat, increasing the temperature of the substance. Conversely, if we want to convert a substance from a gas to a liquid or from a liquid to a solid, we remove energy from the system and decrease the temperature. Pressure also plays an important role in changes of state, which will be discussed later on. We will study these difference in greater detail in the chapter States of Matter.

A: Alexander

Problem: Two scientist, Pete and Gill, studied the Earth's crust and geology. Pete studied earthquakes, while Gill studied mantles and volcanos. Given the paragraph above, please answer correctly the following question: Which person studied less about mantle melting? Hint: Mantle melting can come about three ways: (1) when the temperature rises, (2) if the pressure lowers (which lowers the melting point), and (3) if water is added, which lowers the melting point. Two of these (1 and 3) might explain why there are volcanoes at convergent plate boundaries the temperature of the subducting plate increases as it sinks into the hot mantle (1). Sediments lying on top of the subducting plate contain water. As the sediments subduct, the water rises into the overlying mantle material. This lowers the melting temperature of the mantle (3). When the mantle above the subducting plate melts, volcanoes form above it. This leads to volcanoes in an island arc or continental arc.

A: Pete

Problem: Ricky, an entomologist, is observing an ant colony in his back yard. After some observation, he discovers that all the ants travel down one of two distinct paths in order to find food to bring back to the colony. After taking some measurements, Ricky sees that path A is approximately 100 meters in length, and path B is approximately 150 meters in length. Ricky is now trying to make some scientific conclusions based on these observations. Given the paragraph above, please answer correctly the following question: If we wanted path B to be marched over more frequently, would path B need to be shorter or longer? Hint: In the natural world, ants of some species (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but instead to follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication). Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, by comparison, gets marched over more frequently, and thus the pheromone density becomes higher on shorter paths than longer ones. Pheromone evaporation also has the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would be constrained. The influence of pheromone evaporation in real ant systems is unclear, but it is very important in artificial systems.[8]

A: shorter

Problem: David is interested in how electricity works. One day he had two electric charges to investigate, charge A and charge B - both of the charges were negative. He also had two electric fields, field C and field D. He noticed that electric charges were moving from field C to field D. Given the paragraph above, please answer correctly the following question: Would field D have higher or lower potential energy than field C? Hint: Electric potential energy comes from the position of a charged particle in an electric field. For example, when two negative charges are close together, they have potential energy because they repel each other and have the potential to push apart. If the charges actually move apart, their potential energy decreases. Electric charges always move spontaneously from a position where they have higher potential energy to a position where they have lower potential energy. This is like water falling over a dam from an area of higher to lower potential energy due to gravity.

A:
lower