Question

Air is an example of a ______.
A. solid in gas mixture
B. liquid in gas mixture
C. gas in gas mixture
D. liquid in liquid mixture

Answer 1

Hint: Think about what air is and what are its components. Consider the state of air and the proportion of the components and what phase they are present in at room temperature. This will give you an idea about the type of mixture air is.

Complete step by step answer:
We know that air is mainly composed of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. All other gases are present in trace amounts. Nitrogen and oxygen are present in the largest amount with nitrogen standing at 78% and oxygen at 21%. The remaining 1% or air contains all other trace elements.
Since nitrogen is present in the most quantity, we can call that the solvent and we can call oxygen the solute. We know that both nitrogen as well as oxygen are present in the gas phase at temperatures that are easily able to sustain life i.e. basically all around us. So, since both the main components are present in the gas phase, we can say that air is a gas in gas mixture. We can also consider air to be a solution since the components of air cannot be easily separated out, this may be on account of the fact that air is present in an extremely large quantity around us and contains a lot of different trace elements.
So, the correct answer is “Option C”.

Note: The presence of aerosols or particulate matter that act as pollutants in air may be confusing. You may think that the presence of aerosols will make air a liquid in gas mixture and the presence of particulate matter and dust will make it a solid in gas mixture. But this is not the case since they are present in such trace amounts, it is as good as they do not exist as compared to the proportions of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide.