Natural Science Puzzler



There are many household products that form dangerous compounds when mixed. For example, most ammonia based cleaners have warnings about using the cleaner with bleach. Through a somewhat complicated sequence of reactions, the nitrogen in the ammonia and the chlorine in the bleach combine to form a toxic gas.

There is another deadly combination that involves a simpler reaction. Muriatic acid is a standard industrial cleaner that is used for cleaning many things such as swimming pools. It is composed mostly of simple HCl or hydrochloric acid.
(You can buy it in most hardware stores.) Rat poison often contains the compound NaCN, sodium cyanide. (Recall that cyanide is the polyatomic ion (CN)-.)

Keeping the two together in the same storage room is courting disaster. Perhaps you are moving a heavy box in this storage room and the sharp edge of the box pierces the plastic bottle of muriatic acid. It spills over the box of rat poison. The reactant side of the reaction is

HCl + NaCN ----> ?

  1. What do you think the products of this reaction are? (There are two.)
  2. Which one do you think is the dangerous product?
  3. The dangerous product is ocassionally used by man. For a bonus (you may need to do a little research), for what is it used?



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