My Benzene Law Firm

Archive for February, 2010

The following was sent to me. Is it true? I don’t have a/c in my car but know people who do.

Please do not turn on A/C as soon as you enter the car. Open the windows after you enter your car and turn ON the air-conditioning after a couple of minutes.
Here’s why: According to research, the car dashboard, sofa, air freshener emit Benzene, a Cancer causing toxin (carcinogen – take time to observe the smell of heated plastic in your car). In addition to causing cancer, Benzene poisons your bones, causes anemia and reduces white blood cells. Prolonged exposure will cause Leukemia, increasing the risk of cancer. May also cause miscarriage. Acceptable Benzene level indoors is 50 mg per sq. ft.. A car parked indoors with windows closed will contain 400-800 mg of Benzene. If parked outdoors under the sun at a temperature above 60 degrees F, the Benzene level goes up to 2000-4000 mg, 40 times the acceptable level… People who get into the car, keeping windows closed will inevitably inhale, in quick succession excessive amounts of the toxin.
Benzene is a toxin that affects your kidney and liver. What’s worse, it is extremely difficult for your body to expel this toxic stuff.
So friends, please open the windows and door of your car – give time for interior to air out – dispel the deadly stuff – before you enter.
Thanks.
I know a lot of emails like that are scaremongering but I don’t have or know much about air con to have an opinion. It was sent to me by someone who I thought would know about these things.

It is a load of rubbish. Any such harmful chemicals are in too low a concentration to cause problems or not present at all.

Benzene diazonium chloride, C6H5NNCl, decomposes by first order rate law. If the rate constant at 20 C is 4.3*10-5/s, how long will it take for 61% of the compaound to decompose? I saw someone already asked a similar question but the solution was hard to follow. Please help!

The integrated first order equation is:
ln[C6H5NNCl] = ln[C6H5NNCl]o – kt.
The left side of the equation is the concentration of the reactant at any time t, so if 61% of the C6H5NNCl decomposes, then 39% remains. The concentration on the right side of the equation is at time t = 0; so we can let [C6H5NNCl]o = 100 and [C6H5NNCl] = 39. Just substitute;
ln(39) = ln(100) – (4.3*10-5/s) t;
Solving, t = 21,899 s; or about 6 hr 5 min.

Dear local townspeople,

Do you believe our town is as clean as it could be? Everyday you walk the streets of our city and smell that nasty smoke which smokers leave behind. All those chemicals and poisons can not be good to have floating around in the air. Smokers have an adverse effect not only on themselves, but also to those people around them as well. Smokers are trashing our peaceful town by just throwing their cigarette butts on the ground where we all have to walk and our children have to play. This type of filth is not acceptable. Our city deserves to be a clean place suitable for all of those who live in it. I am proposing that we put a new law into place that bans smoking in all public areas in our town. I am advocating for this change because smoking exposes innocent people to secondhand smoke, it fills our town with unwanted filth, and because it encourages negative health actions by letting children watch adults who are smoking.
Smoking out in public not only damages smokers’ bodies, but also those who have to be around them. Secondhand smoke is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. It is involuntarily inhaled by nonsmokers. It lingers in the air hours after cigarettes have been extinguished and can cause or exacerbate a wide range of adverse health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections, and asthma. Secondhand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke. It contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic, including formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic ammonia and hydrogen cyanide. Secondhand smoke causes almost 50,000 deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year. Therefore, if we ban smoking in all public places in our town we will be able to prevent many diseases and deaths from occurring. Together we can make our town a healthier place to live.

What can I do to make this better?

Well, I’d like to first say that you have a pretty solid basis here, but I would add some stylistic changes to increase the persuasive function of the essay.

First, don’t name smokers as the cause right away.
start by just pointing out all the filth, getting your audience agreeing with you, THEN you blame it on the smokers. If you lay blame to quickly, your audience may think you’re finger-pointing or presumptuous, and that’s not persuasive.

Second, I would make the descriptions more vivid. Don’t just stop by saying that there’s filth and smoke, but DESCRIBE the experience, it’ll be more convincing,
other than that it’s good

Benzene poisoning occurs primarily through inhalation of its vapors. Although benzene can penetrate the skin, intact skin does not easily absorb benzene into the body.

Benzene primarily attacks the blood-forming tissues of the body. Benzene damages the bone marrow where red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets are formed. These three components make up the blood and a shortage of any one of them will result in serious blood disease. Benzene is known to affect all three of these components and thus workers exposed to benzene show a variety of blood diseases.

HN03 + Mg(OH)3—-> HOH + Mg(NO3)2

And could someone check these few please? Thanks

Benzene is a common hydrocarbon which is widely used as a solvent. Benzene is 92.3% carbon and 7.7% hydrogen.
a)What is the empirical formula for benzene? I got CH

b)From another experiment the molecular mass of benzene was determined to be 78 grams per mole. What is the molecular forumla for benzen? I came up with C6H6

Aspirin is 60% carbon, 4.48% hydrogen and 35.53% oxygen. What is the empirical forumla for aspirin? I came up with C9H8O4.

A) and b) are correct
Aspirin is correct

NOTE: it is Mg(OH)2 not Mg(OH)3
The balanced equation is-
2HNO3 + Mg(OH)2 –> 2H2O + Mg(NO3)2
Determine the molar mass of HNO3 (times 2) and Mg(OH)2 and add them together. Then determine the molar mass of H2O (times 2) and Mg(NO3)2 and add them together. Are the two numbers the same (the mass of the reactants and the mass of the products)?