Orders of magnitude (molar concentration)

So, imagine you have a box of toys. That box can hold a certain number of toys - let's say it can hold 10 toys.

Now, imagine you have a bigger box. This box can hold 10 of the first boxes - so it can hold 100 toys.

That's kind of like what we mean by "orders of magnitude." It's a way of talking about how big or small something is compared to something else, by looking at the difference in size by 10 times - we say that the bigger box is "one order of magnitude" bigger than the smaller box.

Now, let's think about molar concentration. That's a fancy way of talking about how much of a certain material is dissolved in a solution. It's like if you have a cup of juice, how much sugar is in the juice (because the sugar is dissolved in the juice).

So, if we have one cup of juice and there's 1 gram of sugar in it, we could say the molar concentration of sugar in the juice is 1 gram/cup.

But, if we have a really big jug of juice, that's a lot more juice than one cup. If there's still 1 gram of sugar in the jug, then the molar concentration of sugar is going to be a lot smaller - because there's a lot more juice to dissolve the sugar in.

So, we might say that the larger jug of juice has a molar concentration of sugar that's 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the smaller cup of juice - because it's 10 times bigger than the cup, 10 times bigger than that first bigger box of toys, and 10 times bigger than that second bigger box of toys.

That's how we use "orders of magnitude" to talk about very big or very small differences in concentration, by looking at the difference in size by 10 times at a time.