Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-2/a7/d/ii/solution

For hydrogen, the electronic ground state has , while the proton has no electronic degeneracy, . For sodium, the neutral ground state has and the closed-shell ion has . Ignoring hyperfine structure and consistently cancelling nuclear-spin factors, for both.
At ,
It is convenient to calculate the density , which avoids choosing an unnecessary numerical value of the standard density. The results are
Thus hydrogen is about ionized, whereas sodium is about ionized in the stated ground-state ideal-gas model. The large difference is dominated by the smaller sodium ionization energy in the exponential. The weak-ionization approximation is excellent for hydrogen but would be inaccurate for sodium, so the quadratic solution is needed there.

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