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| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
That really depends whether or not Billy is running an industrial assembly line. I mean, it's pretty unlikely that he has the equipment sitting around in his basement to melt and fuse copper with perfect efficiency and without introducing any impurities. So I'd have to assume he's working at a plant somewhere.
Assuming that, we still need to know if it's a clean room, like a fab, or a regular factory where the copper slabs have no doubt picked up all sorts of dirt, and the melting process probably leaves a copper residue behind.
Now, since the question explicitly states "the resulting piece", it also clearly suggests a freezing process. Does it go into a freezer, sealed, or is it just left sitting around until it solidifies? If memory serves, copper doesn't sublimate, but the impurities might at the right atmospheric temperature, which means that the resulting solid might actually be slightly more pure than the original liquid.
Finally, how is the determination of purity being made? It's easy enough to weigh the thing, but in order to determine the purity you usually have to melt it down or distill it, which seems to be a pointless exercise here after making the new alloy. And if Billy had to melt down the original two samples just to find out the purity, how can we be sure that he didn't lose some copper in that process, before he even started combining them? Are we assuming a specific loss rate here or are these ideal, perfect (i.e. imaginary) conditions?
More to the point, if Billy already has a scale, which he would have needed to weigh the final sample, why didn't he just weigh the original two samples in the first place instead of going through all this ridiculous hassle? |
I could just imagine some kid at school writing that down on a test because he didn't know the answer.
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| quote: | | Scott has been introduced to the rave scene, and Ecstasy, by Craig. The two of them go out on the weekends, with some of Craigs friends, and stay up all night, dancing in a drug-fueled trance. |
Last edited by Moral Hazard on Apr-26-2011 at 07:48
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