Question

select the option that show the correct order of percentage of each component in the air in decreasing order that is the component with highest percentage is placed first and that with lower is placed last.
a. Nitrogen - oxygen - argon - carbon dioxide.
b. Oxygen - nitrogen - argon - carbon dioxide.
c. carbon dioxide - argon - oxygen - carbon dioxide.
d. carbon dioxide - oxygen - nitrogen - argon

Answer 1

The early Greeks considered "air" to be one of four elementary substances; along with earth, fire, and water, air was viewed as a fundamental component of the universe. By the early 1800s, however, scientists such as John Dalton recognized that the atmosphere was in fact composed of several chemically distinct gases, which he was able to separate and determine the relative amounts of within the lower atmosphere. He was easily able to discern the major components of the atmosphere: nitrogen, oxygen, and a small amount of something incombustible, later shown to be argon.

The development of the spectrometer in the 1920s allowed scientists to find gases that existed in much smaller concentrations in the atmosphere, such as ozone and carbon dioxide. The concentrations of these gases, while small, varied widely from place to place. In fact, atmospheric gases are often divided up into the major, constant components and the highly variable components, as shown in Table 1 and Table 2.