Given the question: Answer the following question given this paragraph: Chemical and physical changes in a system may be accompanied by either an increase or a decrease in the disorder of the system, corresponding to an increase in entropy (S> 0) or a decrease in entropy (S < 0), respectively. As with any other state function, the change in entropy is defined as the difference between the entropies of the final and initial states: S = Sf Si. When a gas expands into a vacuum, its entropy increases because the increased volume allows for greater atomic or molecular disorder. The greater the number of atoms or molecules in the gas, the greater the disorder. The magnitude of the entropy of a system depends on the number of microscopic states, or microstates, associated with it (in this case, the number of atoms or molecules); that is, the greater the number of microstates, the greater the entropy. We can illustrate the concepts of microstates and entropy using a deck of playing cards, as shown in Figure 18.7 "Illustrating Low- and High-Entropy States with a Deck of Playing Cards". In any new deck, the 52 cards are arranged by four suits, with each suit arranged in descending order. If the cards are shuffled, however, there are approximately 1068 different ways they might be arranged, which corresponds to 1068different microscopic states. The entropy of an ordered new deck of cards is therefore low, whereas the entropy of a randomly shuffled deck is high. Card games assign a higher value to a hand that has a low degree of disorder. In games such as five-card poker, only 4 of the 2,598,960 different possible hands, or microstates, contain the highly ordered and valued arrangement of cards called a royal flush, almost 1.1 million hands contain one pair, and more than 1.3 million hands are completely disordered and therefore have no value. Because the last two arrangements are far more probable than the first, the value of a poker hand is inversely proportional to its entropy. We can see how to calculate these kinds of probabilities for a chemical system by considering the possible... Q: Chemical and physical changes in a system may be accompanied by an increase or a decrease in the disorder of the system, corresponding to an increase or decrease in what? Choices: - enthalpy - vibration - volume - entropy A:
The answer is:
entropy