Question

How is the specific heat of metals compared with water?

Answer 1

Specific heat is the ratio of the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of a body by one degree to that required to raise the temperature of an equal mass of water one degree.

Complete answer:
The specific heat capacity of a substance is the heat capacity of a sample of the substance divided by the mass of the sample. Informally it is the amount of energy that must be added, in the form of heat to one unit mass of a substance to one degree Celsius. The unit of specific heat is J/K Kg .

Substances having higher specific heat get heated up taking a long time and the substances having low specific heat get heated up quickly. Similar is the case in their cooling. If we consider an example of a metal spoon which we use for stirring the soup, if we leave the spoon in the soup for some time while supplying heat to the container of the soup, we observe that the spoon gets heated up more than the soup. This is because metals have low specific heat and the water has highest specific heat. This is the reason why specific heat of a metal is compared with water.

Note: Materials which have small specific heat capacity are very useful as a cooking instrument material such as frying pan, pots, kettles and so on, because they can be heated up even when a small amount of heat is applied to the utensils. Sensitive thermometers also must be made from materials with small specific heat capacity so that temperature variation can be easily detected.