Hess's law

Hess's law is like baking a cake! You need to mix all the ingredients together in the right amounts to make a delicious cake.

Chemists use Hess's law to figure out how much energy is released or absorbed during a chemical reaction. Just like a cake has different ingredients that come together to make it, chemical reactions have different steps that lead to the final result.

Imagine you're making a cake, and you have to mix flour, sugar, eggs, and milk. But what if you needed to mix the ingredients in a different order, or you added a little more flour or sugar? The cake might not turn out the same way.

In chemistry, Hess's law helps us figure out the total amount of energy released or absorbed in a chemical reaction, no matter how many steps are involved or what order they occur in. We can think of each step as an ingredient, and we can use the law to calculate the overall energy change for the whole reaction, even if we don't know the energy changes for each step.

So just like you can make sure your cake turns out perfect by measuring your ingredients and mixing them in the right order, chemists use Hess's law to make sure they get the right results in a chemical reaction.