so what exactly is a mole we're not talking about the animal but in terms of chemistry what is a mole an example that I like to use is the word dozen when you hear the word dozen what do you think of if I tell you that I have a dozen eggs how many eggs do I have a dozen is a quantity it represents a specific number it doesn't have to be eggs a dozen simply represents 12 if I say I have a dozen calculators that means I have 12 calculators if I have a dozen hats I have 12 hats a mole is very similar to a dozen and that a mole is also a quantity it represents a number the only difference is it represents a very very very large number 6.022 * 10^ 23 that's what it represents so if I have a mole of books I have 6 * 10^ 23 books which is probably not practical it's too many books to have so a mole is usually the purpose of a mole is to represent a quantity of atoms or particles because you could have one gram of material and it could be billions and billions and billions of atoms inside of it so instead of you know saying a large number like 6 * 10 23 you could say I have a mole of atoms so you could represent a large quantity with a very simple expression and so that's the basic idea behind a mole it's simply to represent a large quantity of something which is very useful in chemistry when you dealing with atoms molecules and particles so let's say if I have a mole of carbon atoms what that means is that I have 6 * 10 23 atoms of carbon so I have a large number of carbon atoms if I have two moles of carbon atoms then I have two times I'm going to round this to six I have 2 * 6 * 10 23 atoms of carbon let's say if I have a mole of carbon dioxide CO2 is a molecule so what this means is that I have 6 * 10^ 23 molecules of CO2 so mole as you can see it represents a large quantity of particles or anything else for that matter now sometimes you may need to relate moles to G you can also relate moles to G consider the element nitrogen on a periodic table nitrogen has an atomic number of s and a mass number of 14 we're going to focus on the mass number which you can also represent as 14 atomic mass units the number 14 also represents something called the molar mass it's 14 G per mole now think about what that means 14 G per mole so that means that one mole of nitrogen has a mass of 14 G and we know that a mole is 6 * 10 23 atoms or particles or molecules but n is just an atom so 14 G of nitrogen contains 6 * 10^ 23 atoms so now you can connect everything together so let's say if I have 2 mol of nitrogen atoms this would have a mass of 28 G of nit nren if I have 3 mol of nitrogen that's going to be 42 G of nitrogen 3 * 14 and so as you can see the mole is proportional to the mass and thus you have the expression molar mass that's the mass of an element when you have one mole of substance another example is Florine with an atomic number of N9 and a mass number of 19 so the mol mass of of Florine is 19 G per mole so that means that 19 G of Florine is equal to 1 mole of Florine which in itself is 6 * 10 to the 23 atoms of Florine so now you know how to connect grams to moles to atoms for