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« Last post by Corribus on Today at 11:58:39 AM »
Protip: It's hard to interpret data without knowing exactly what you did. The rate is a measure of what, exactly?
Beyond that, I would regard the data for the reaction with iron to be fairly meaningless, since (as Borek noted) iron is also one of your reactants. The slightly faster rate may just be because there's more of it.
Based just on your numbers, it would appear that Cu > Ag > control. Ideally your counterion would be the same to ensure that isn't changing things, but I guess too late now. Your value with Ag is pretty close to your control. Maybe it's significant but you haven't provided any statistical analysis so hard to know. So really what I've got is that maybe Ag is catalyzing your reaction a little, and Cu probably is.
These are just numbers, though. Hard to make any mechanistic conclusions from a few measured rates alone, much less without any information about what you did, what your balanced reaction is, and etc. Catalytic mechanisms are generally complicated and require lots of experiments to fully figure out, and it usually isn't obvious just by inspection why one metal is a good catalyst and another isn't - and it usually doesn't come down to "this is +2 and this is +1". You may consider searching the literature to better understand how copper catalyzes this reaction; then maybe you can say something about why Ag is less effective. This is generally the best approach to completing a laboratory write-up, just like science in the real world.
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