One Mole is A Lot of Things

modified from Dave Tanis

When working with the mole concept, students often have trouble comprehending the enormous size of Avogadro's number, 6.02 x 10²³. The following anologies may be helpful for students.

• If there were a mole of rice grains, all the land area in the whole world would be covered with rice to a depth of about 75 meters.
• One mole of rice grains is more grains than all the grain that has been grown since the beginning of time. (1)
• One mole of rice would occupy a cube about 120 miles on an edge! (1)
• A mole of marshmallows would cover the United States to a depth of 600 miles (3)
• In order to put a mole of rain drops in a 30 meter (about 100 feet) diameter tank, the sides of the tank would have to be 280 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. (4)
• A mole of hockey pucks would be equal to the mass of the Moon.
• Assuming that each human being has 60 trillion body cells (6.0 x 10¹³) and the Earth's population is 6 billion (6 x 10⁹), the total number of living human body cells on the Earth at the present time is 3.6 x 10²³or a little over half of a mole.
• If one mole of pennies were divided up among the Earth's population, each person would receive 1 x 10¹⁴ pennies.  Personal spending at the rate of one million dollars a day would use up each persons wealth in about three thousand years.  Life would not be comfortable because the surface of the Earth would be covered in copper coins to a depth of at least 400 meters.
• If you had a mole of pennies and wanted to buy kite string at the rate of a million dollars per inch, you would get your money's worth. After stretching your string around the Earth one million times, and to the Moon and back twenty-five times, you would have enough string left over to sell back at a dollar an inch (a decided loss) to gain enough money to buy every man, woman and child in the US a $50,000 automobile and enough gasoline to run it at 55 mph for a year.  After those purchases, you would still have enough money left over to give every man, woman, and child in the whole world about $5000.

Basis for calculations:
Earth's circumference = 25,000 miles                Distance to moon = 240,000 miles
Cost of gasoline = $2.50 per gallon                   Gasoline mileage = 20 miles per gallon
U.S. population = 220,000,000                        World population = 6,000,000,000

References
(1) Kolb, Doris.  "The Mole," J. Chem. Educ., 55:728-32 (1970)
(2) Heikkinan, H. and Atkinson, G., Reactions and Reason, Harper and Row, NY, 1973 ed. p. 69.
(3) Teacher's Guide, S