DESCRIBE HOW BALANCING AN EQUATION IS SIMILAR TO COOKING.

You have to have the right amount of ingredients to produce the amount of food you want. For example, you're going to need at least a tablespoon of salt in a cookie dough recipe of you want the cookies to be salty. In chemistry, you need a specific amount to produce a product. For example, you will need 1 atom of Chlorine and 1 atom of Sodium in order to to produce one molecule of NaCl (table salt).

A balanced chemical equation provides the same kind of quantitative information that a recipe does. How is a balanced equation like a recipe? Chemists use balanced chemical equations as a basis to calculate how much reactant is needed or product is formed in a reaction.