Q. Calculate the specific heat of strange metal?

Ans. You found a 50.0 sample of an unknown metal while you were scuba diving near the remains of anancient ship wreck. To test if it might be valuable, the piece of metal is placed in boiling water. Then it is removed and put in a calorimeter with 100.00 g of water at 20.0 ^oC. The boiling water was 99.6 ^oC. When the temperature of the water in the calorimeter became constant the final temperature of the water and the metal is 23.9 ^oC. Calculate the specific heat of this strange metal.

The trick to this kind of problem is that the heat lost by the metal is equal to the heat gained by the water. We must first calculate the heat that the water has gained.

This tells us that the metal must have lost 1630.2 J of energy.

Let's write the equation and solve for c, the specific heat

c = 0.0431 J/g ^oC

Another way of approaching this problem is to write it as one big long equation:

then just substitute in and solve.