[MITaylor]

The question is: "When glucose is burned in air, carbon dioxide and water vapor are produced.  Write the balanced chemical equation for the process."  As the unbalanced chemical equation, I'm guessing it's "C₆H₁₂O₆    CO₂ + H₂0."  I've started balancing (six of carbon dioxide to balance the carbon in glucose, six of water vapor to balance the hydrogen in glucose, and three of glucose to balance the oxygen), but I feel like it's going to keep going in a loop.  Should I keep going the way I am, or did I write the equation incorrectly?
Thanks!

[sjb]

The question is: "When glucose is burned in air, carbon dioxide and water vapor are produced.  Write the balanced chemical equation for the process."  As the unbalanced chemical equation, I'm guessing it's "C₆H₁₂O₆    CO₂ + H₂O."  I've started balancing (six of carbon dioxide to balance the carbon in glucose, six of water vapor to balance the hydrogen in glucose, and three of glucose to balance the oxygen), but I feel like it's going to keep going in a loop.  Should I keep going the way I am, or did I write the equation incorrectly?
Thanks!

What are the components of air?

[MITaylor]

I don't know... I'm in my second semester of honors chem; we're not going into that right now.  We've gone over balancing equations a while back and now we're onto using moles of a reactant to find grams of a product (or vice/versa), which is actually the second part of this question.  For the most part, I've got balancing and moles down, but I'm stuck on this one.

[Borek]

What it means "burned in the air"? More precisely - what is burning and why is the air necessary?

[MITaylor]

Oh, that's just the book trying to come up with a fancy way to say "when glucose is burned, carbon dioxide and water are produced."  It does that a lot.

[Borek]

Sigh.

Why is the air necessary?

[MITaylor]

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have added that in sry...
It's just my stupid book's attempt at giving us real-life examples lol

[Arkcon]

You're really going to have to try harder with this, and stop blaming the book.  What happens to burning things, when we seal them away from fresh air?  Why does that happen?  For that matter, if we seal a living animal, in a container without fresh air, what happens, sooner or later?  If something in the air is needed, then isn't it a reactant, and need in the balanced reaction?

[Zyklonb]

[Chuckles...]
Look at the equation, there is not enough of ______ to produce CO₂ and H₂O. You are missing a reactant on the left side of the equation which makes it impossible to balance.

I'm in my second semester of honors chem.

Ah.