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Air pump

Learning objectives

  • Illustrate the relationship between pressure and number of molecules.
  • Observe how a gas behaves when it is confined to a certain volume.

Air is composed of freely moving molecules. Air molecules trapped in a volume occupy all of the available space and rebound against the walls. The number of rebounds on the walls is directly related to the notion of pressure. The more molecules there are, the more they hit each other, the more numerous the rebounds are. The pressure therefore increases with the quantity of molecules.

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