Question

How do reaction rates give information about mechanisms?

Answer 1

The mechanism of a chemical reaction is the proper sequence of the elementary steps involved to form the final products from the reactants. Mechanism of the reaction explains how the chemical reaction proceeds.

Complete answer:
- In the question it is asked how the rate of the reaction gives information about the reaction mechanism.
- Mechanism is nothing but the clear cut way of expressing the occurrence of the chemical reaction.
- We can write a rate law for every step which is going to occur in the chemical mechanism.
- After writing the rate law for every step we have to put them together to get the overall rate law for the respective chemical reaction.
- We can write any number of steps of mechanism and we can write the respective rate laws.
- The mechanism that we wrote may be not going to match with the experimental result, it is may be correct.
- Because maybe there is an existence of a different mechanism which proves the experimental result.
- Therefore by using reaction rate we will get some information about the mechanism of the chemical reaction.

Note:
Generally for students there is no need to write the mechanism for general chemistry. But we can derive the rate law for a proposed chemical reaction and we can check with the experimental results whether it is going to agree with results or not.