Humiliating! Student References Avocado’s Number During Chem Lab
Photo by Personal Creations / Flickr, PRHaney / Wikimedia Commons
July 20, 2017 at 11:00 am
The latest in our series of Words People Confuse With Avocado brings us to the shameful experience of Abby Pullman (C ‘20). Originally pre-med, Abby had enrolled in many of the introductory classes first semester Freshman year. She was cautiously ambitious, and anticipated the classes would be difficult but manageable. It all started off well. Abby was balancing BBB109, Physics 150, Chem101, and Math 104, in addition to a growing social life and occasionally going to a Penn Dems meeting. But the good times could not last.
It was during a Chem lab period that it happened. Her lab group was trying to calculate how much Hydrogen Chloride to add to their solution, so they needed to do some unit-conversion. Abby recalled, “Well, Avocado’s Number is 6.022 x 10^23.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, Avocado’s Number - the number of units in a mole?”
“Do you mean Avogadro’s Number?”
Abby suddenly realized her mistake. She tried to shrug it off: “Oh yeah haha, I totally knew that.”
Her lab group was not fooled. Since that day, Abby has been sent 25 anonymous avocados. Though hurt and embarrassed, Abby has all but perfected her guacamole. So really, the joke’s on them.