Jin Haijun
Abstract:
For a long time, in some "general chemistry" or "Inorganic Chemistry" textbooks at home and abroad, there are two contradictory situations in the description of the order of the activity (also called "activeness") of sodium and calcium two metals, which is often one of the problems that students encounter in the process of learning this course, and it is necessary to discuss and solve.For example, when describing the chemical properties of metals in the previous high school Chemistry section (1), "...The more easily an atom of a metallic element loses electrons, the more chemically active it is.On the contrary, the less active it is.In fact, various metal atoms, due to their different structures, need to consume different amounts of energy when they lose electrons.Therefore, there is indeed a significant difference in the activity of metals.The order of activity of metals discovered by Bechtov (published in 1865 - author’s note) is related to the ease with which metals lose electrons.The order of metal activity is shown in Table 1: