Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/paper-1/5/a/ii/solution

The Arrhenius equation is
The exponential gives the strongly temperature-dependent energetic factor. For a simple bimolecular collision picture, collects the encounter frequency per reactant concentration and the fraction of encounters with a suitable orientation and other dynamical requirements. Thus a collision is not automatically a successful reaction even when its energy is sufficient.
has the same units as , which depend on the rate law; it is not always a frequency in . More generally it is an effective prefactor containing statistical and dynamical contributions rather than a literal universal collision count. Treating it as temperature independent is the approximation requested here.

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