Acids and Bases

What are acids and bases?

Bases and acids are chemicals that are found in many things like the food we are using in this experiment. We can tell when something is an acid or a base by using the ph scale to such as the one below.

When you do an experiment that produces a change in colour you can compare that new colour to the PH scale to determine whether it is a base or acid.

In our experiment, we will be using citric acid. Citric acid is an edible acid found in many fruits like oranges and lemons. It is often used for flavouring or preserving food as it kills bacteria. A mentioned before we will be using lemons, oranges and Berocca tablets to test different levels of citric acid reacting with red cabbage to test how long it will take for the water to turn from purple to pink.

Lemons have 4-6% of citric acid in them, Berocca tablets 46.4% of citric acid per tablet and oranges have about 0.6-1% of citric acid. As you can see, each food has a different concentration of citric acid in them which will affect the rate reaction.