we know that pure water is a neutral solution because it has precisely the same concentrations of hydronium and hydroxide since each ionization of water results in one of each of those ions a solution will only be acidic or basic if one of those ions is present in Greater concentration than the other this means that besides pure water other Solutions can be neutral even if there are a lot of hydronium ions and hydroxide ions they simply need to be present in the same concentrations this is what can happen when we react strong acids and strong bases protons from the acid and hydroxides from the base if present in the same amount will react to form water molecules and an ionic salt resulting in a neutral solution since neither of these substances is an acid or a base we call this kind of reaction between strong acid and strong base in aquous solution a neutralization reaction of course this will only result in a neutral solution if precise stochiometric amounts of acid and base are mixed and even then it will only be neutral if the acid and base are both strong for example as we can see here Hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide if mixed in equal proportions will generate water and sodium chloride this particular neutralization reaction will result in a neutral solution if a strong acid reacts with a weak base the resulting solution will be relatively acidic for reasons that we will investigate later similarly a weak acid and a strong base will generate a slightly basic solution solution for similar reasons as the previous solution that we will again investigate later and then lastly when a weak acid and weak base interact it becomes complicated to predict what kind of solution will result and we typically have to do some math we might get an acidic solution a basic solution or even a neutral solution depending on which is slightly weaker the acid or the base let's take a closer look at each of these scenarios to get a better idea of what is happening in each type of neutralization reaction