chemistry help please?

Question

what is the simplest formula for cesium carbonate?

please help me i really don't get this.

Answer 1

OK, first what you need to know is what cesium is, and what carbonate is. Cesium is the cesium ION (NOT the atom), written as [Cs]+. (Actually the plus sign is a superscript when you write it out, and you don't write the brackets, but I can't do that on the internet so I'll use brackets to demonstrate charge.) This just means you took the cesium atom, Cs, and took away an electron, which made it positively charged. [Cs]+. OK.

What does carbonate look like? Well, that's [CO3]2-, or carbon bonded to three oxygens, with two electrons added to the whole thing to make it all an ion. Polyatomic ions, they're called.

OK, so you have an ion that has a positive charge of 1, and an ion that has a negative charge of 2. When you put them together and make them into a compound, the total charge of that compound has to be 0. But if you put cesium and carbonate together, the charge of that compound will be -1. Do the math: +1 - 2 = -1. So what do you need? You need another positive charge, to make it equal out to 0! Where are you going to get that other positive charge? Well, another cesium ion, since each cesium ion has a charge of +1. So if you put together two cesium ions and a carbonate ion, the charge of the whole thing will be 0, which is what you want in a compound.

You write that as Cs2(CO3), which just means two cesium ions bonded to a carbonate ion. (Oh, and you don't write the charges once you have them combined in a molecule, because the charges cancel out like I just demonstrated.)

Hope I helped!

Answer 2

Cs(2)CO(3)

the numbers in parentheses are subscripts.
cesium forms a 1+ ion and carbonate has a 2- charge so in order to make the compound neutral, you need two cesiums to cancel out the 2- charge of the carbonate, hence the two after Cs

Answer 3

Cs2CO3. Carbonate is a -2 anion, cesium forms a +1 cation.