Specific Heat

Imagine you have a big pot of soup and you put it on the stove to heat it up. Before long, the soup gets hot enough that you can see steam rising from it. The heat from the stove made the soup get hotter, and that's how specific heat works!

But what is specific heat? It's a way to measure how much heat something can hold or release. Different materials like soup, water, and metal can absorb heat at different rates, which is why some things cool off or heat up more quickly than others.

Specific heat helps us measure how much heat a substance can hold or lose before its temperature changes. Scientists measure this by seeing how much heat is needed to raise the temperature of a material by a certain amount.

For example, water has a high specific heat because it takes a lot of heat to make it get just a little bit hotter. On the other hand, metals like copper have low specific heat and heat up quickly because they don't need as much heat to change temperature.

So, specific heat is a way to measure how much heat something can hold or release before its temperature changes, and different materials have different specific heats depending on their properties.