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Categories: school
Written by Stefan Nikolaj
01 Apr 2022

Imagine you’re doing a chemistry exam, and you’re at the last question. You’ve forgotten about the passage of time, you’ve forgotten about anything else except for a song that’s stuck in your head and looping repeatedly, and suddenly you see a question that asks you to balance this equation:

__C2H7N + __O2 → __CO2 + __H2O + __N2

However, unfortunately, the last of your brain cells are either exhausted or eliminated, and you forgot how the process of balancing goes… Well, here I present to you a small and simple method to balance equations that will make sure you never have to think or fail an exam. It just involves a bit of practice, and then you’ll never forget it. To demonstrate, I will use a TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator, however it’s possible to use this method even without a calculator, though having one makes it significantly easier. I will first outline the steps needed, and then provide a condensed version with mnemonics so that you can easily remember it.

Detailed procedure:

  C2H7N O2 CO2 H2O N2
C          
H          
N          
O          

  In other words, have the column identifiers correspond to each compound, and the row identifiers to each element.

  C2H7N O2 CO2 H2O N2
C 2 0 1 0 0
H 7 0 0 2 0
N 1 0 0 0 2
O 0 2 2 1 0

Now, even if this method appears to be long, with only a few minutes of practice you can cut out the step with the table completely and just input the numbers by sight into the calculator, which means that you can balance equations correctly every time, with no effort, in less than a minute. To recap:

  1. Write down number of compounds and elements
  2. Make table for compounds x elements
  3. Input amount of each element in each compound for the corresponding cell
  4. Make system of equations
  5. Solve system of equations
  6. Copy result