Select the correct answer. How does activation energy affect a chemical reaction? A. It increases the energy of the reactants. B. It determines how difficult it is to start the reaction. C. It determines how much product can form. D. It decreases the energy of the products.

It determines how difficult it is to start the reaction.

Answer: B

Explanation

The activation energy is defined as the threshold energy required to the overcome the potential barrier among the reactants to form products by chemical reaction method.

So a chemical reaction can be occurred only when the external energy applied exceeds the activation energy of the reactants.

Thus the amount of activation energy quantifies the reactivity of the reactants.

This means the reactants which are highly reactivity and can start the chemical reaction easily will have less activation energy.

So the high magnitude of activation energy indicates the difficulty in starting of chemical reaction.

If the activation energy is high that means the reactants are less reactive so they require high energy to start the reaction.

Thus the activation energy affect the chemical reaction leading to measure its difficulty to start a reaction.

The activation energy is the energy barrier that must be overcome for reactants to transform into products. In most cases, it determines how difficult it is to start a reaction. It is often described as the energy that must be aquired so as to achieve effective collisions. It is usually represented by the difference between the energy level of the acitvated complex of and that of reactants.