Describe how to separate a mixture of pigments from an ink cartridge

Think of chromatography as a race and you'll find it's much simpler than it sounds. Waiting on the starting line, you've got a mixture of chemicals in some unidentified liquid or gas, just like a load of runners all mixed up and bunched together. When a race starts, runners soon spread out because they have different abilities. In exactly the same way, chemicals in something like a moving liquid mixture spread out because they travel at different speeds over a stationary solid. The key thing to remember is that chromatography is a surface effect.

As the liquid starts to move past the solid, some of its molecules (energetic things that are constantly moving about) are sucked toward the surface of the solid and stick there temporarily before being pulled back again into the liquid they came from. This exchange of molecules between the surface of the solid and the liquid is a kind of adhesive or gluing effect called adsorption (with a d—don't confuse it with absorption, with a b, where molecules of one substance are permanently trapped inside the body of another). Now remember that our liquid is actually a mixture of quite a few different liquids. Each one undergoes adsorption in a slightly different way and spends more or less time in either the solid or the liquid phase. One of the liquids might spend much longer in the solid phase than in the liquid, so it would travel more slowly over the solid; another one might spend less time in the solid and more in the liquid, so it would go a bit faster. Another way of looking at it is to think of the liquid as a mixture of glue-like liquids, some of which stick more to the solid (and travel more slowly) than others. This is what causes the different liquids within our original liquid mixture to spread out on the solid.

to separate a mixture of pigments from an ink cartridge, you would use chromatography.

x =±sqrt(1/3)

step-by-step explanation:

x+4/6x=1/x

multiply each side by 6x to get rid of the fractions

6x*(x+4/6x)=1/x*6x

distribute

6x^2 +4 = 6

subtract 4 from each side

6x^2 +4-4 = 6-4

6x^2 =2

divide by 6

6x^2/6 = 2/6

x^2 = 1/3

take the square root of each side

sqrt(x^2) = ±sqrt(1/3)

x =±sqrt(1/3)