How to Prepare for 9701 Paper 5

How to prepare for Paper 5. This is the website that would definitely help you a lot to prepare for experiments that you are unfamiliar. http://www.practicalchemistry.org/experiments/advanced/category.html There are different types of experiments in this website with complete procedure to carry them out. My advice is not to spend too much time studying paper 5. The examiner is not confined to set question that you have carried out. In those novel cases, sufficient information will be provided to help you to plan them. What the examiner is expecting you to know is whether your chemistry knowledge is sound. • •

If a planning exercise asks you to produce a plan with the minimum number of steps – do as it says! Adding extra detail and including irrelevant extra steps will lose marks. Many planning exercises require you to produce a logical sequence of steps – the order of the steps will be important. To avoid too many corrections and alterations you may find it helpful to try to get the order of steps worked out very briefly in rough before writing your plan on your answer paper.

One of the experiment I could recall is to find the % of copper carbonate in malachite. There are many ways to do this. By thermal decomposition or by reacting with acid. You need to decide which physical quantity you want to measure. In thermal decomposition, you may measure the amount of carbon dioxide produced by mass difference, or collecting the volume of carbon dioxide produced by water displacement. Many students planned the experiment by measuring both the mass of the malachite decomposed and collecting the volume of carbon dioxide. This is redundant. Give only one option. For analysis and evaluation question, you must be able to handle data skillfully as a chemist. You must extract information needed from the raw data. You must read the question very carefully so that you do not miss out any important key information that is derived from the raw data. You have to understand the reaction that is taking place. For example, in May 2008 paper 5 question no. 2 CuCO3.Cu(OH)2.x H2O(s)

2CuO(s) + CO2(g) + (x+1)H2O(g)

The mass lost in the reaction is not merely water or carbon dioxide but both carbon dioxide and water. Pay attention to the physical state of carbon dioxide and water. Both carbon dioxide and water are gases in this reaction. The mass loss must therefore be carbon dioxide and water. Another question in May 2009 No. 2, the question asked for determining the solubility of the sodium iodide. The solubility S must be calculated from the relationship given in the question.

There must be a column S in your table. The graph is a plot of S against the temperature of the saturated solution. (Only 10 % of the students could plot the graph correctly during the examination.) My advice is that you are alert when reading the question so that you do not missed out important information.