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Students may find it tricky, at first, to appreciate that salts are not always pH 7. It maybe helpful to walk through the explanation in terms of the equilibrium of the salt in solution. For example:

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How else might you reinforce the idea that the pH depends upon the particular salt?

You might give your students a selection of salts to test. Take a small amount of each salt, dissolve it in a few cm³ water and test the pH using Universal Indicator paper or solution, or a pH probe. Students could try to explain the pH of each salt using Brønsted Lowry theory.

Activities producing or using titration curves can support students' understanding of what happens when the combinations of weak/strong acids/bases react. A practical example is explored in the subsequent Developing understanding section.

Consider the conjugate pair, ammonia and the ammonium ion, where the ammonium ion (NH₄⁺) is the conjugate acid. How might you show that the NH₄⁺ ion really is acidic?

You might take a test tube with a little ammonium chloride solution, add a small amount of magnesium powder and warm it up. It should fizz gently, giving off hydrogen gas, and leaving a solution smelling of ammonia.

In drawing lines or connections on the board between the conjugate pairs of  Brønsted Lowry substances in order to show the proton transfer, why might it be advisable to avoid arrows on these lines?

Such arrows to indicate the movement of a proton here could be easily confused with the convention of using arrows to denote the direction of movement of an electron pair – this is the opposite direction! For example, if an arrow was used to link the proton being accepted by NH₃ the arrow would go towards it. But the usual electron pair arrow, such as in organic chemistry mechnisms, starts from ammonia (lone pair) and points towards the proton of the other substance.