AP Dread

Friday I found out that this year's AP scores are officially in the mail; in fact, a couple of my friends had already received their scores! Now this year was a pretty big year for me AP-wise. Last year I, the kid who read Wikipedia articles on ancient and medieval history while waiting for programs to download, had gotten a 4 on the World History exam. Suffice to say, that 4 hurt, and I did not want to feel that pain ever again. Thus, I set a goal to get a 5 on each of my five AP exams (I kept repeating to myself "Five AP exams, 5 fives!" every time I prayed/meditated). Well tomorrow's the day of truth, and I'm nervous...

Alas, come what may, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my AP courses. English III was an eye-opening class in terms of rhetoric, and my teacher really helped me out throughout the year in a lot of ways (thanks Ms. Stelly!). Computer science also opened my eyes, for I will never complain about software developers ever again! However, AP Chemistry was by far the coolest class I took this year. Furthermore, since this is a science blog, I thought I’d share the rather odd Iranian cultural oddity I discovered in my chemistry class.

One of the fundamental concepts in chemistry is that of solubility, or how many moles of something, a solute, get dissolved into Xliters of something else, a solvent (usually water). Additionally, if you want a solvent to dissolve more solute than“normal”, then you’d have to raise the temperature of the solvent. A higher temperature, or average kinetic (moving) energy, means faster moving molecules that can disassociate (dissolve) easier. The opposite is true for gases. Raising the temperature of a solvent when trying to “dissolve” a gas would not increase solubility since the gas would actually evaporate away thanks to the higher temperature (think of the CO₂ in cold coca-cola vs. that of hot coke).

            Today, I was making sour cherry juice when I remembered the counterintuitive way Iranians serve sour cherry juice. Sour cherry juice is a refreshing drink popularly served during the summer in Iran. Hosts/Hostesses pour sour cherry concentrate into ice-cold water and serve the undisturbed liquid to the guests—leaving the stirring to the guests. Now from a human perspective, everything makes sense: it’s hot, and you need something cold to drink, but from a chemical perspective, the whole thing is rather stupid. Why would create a solution with cold water when your solute is a liquid? THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE! The chemically-correct way would be to mix the concentrate into hot water, mix, and let the solution cool to room temperature before throwing in a couple of ice cubes when the host/hostess wants to serve the drink. The guests then don’t have to stir as much.

TL;DR: Iranians are counterintuitive when it comes to serving drinks. They force a cold solvent into dissolving a solute by raising the average kinetic energy of the molecules via stirring.