However, because a hydrogen peroxide molecule contains two oxygen atoms, as opposed to the water molecule, which has only one, the two substances exhibit very different properties. For example, water, H 2O, and hydrogen peroxide, H 2O 2, are alike in that their respective molecules are composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The identity of a substance is defined not only by the types of atoms or ions it contains, but by the quantity of each type of atom or ion. The few exceptions to this guideline are very light ions derived from elements with precisely known atomic masses. Even when calculating the mass of an isolated ion, the missing or additional electrons can generally be ignored, since their contribution to the overall mass is negligible, reflected only in the nonsignificant digits that will be lost when the computed mass is properly rounded. Moreover, the mass of an electron is negligibly small with respect to the mass of a typical atom. Even though a sodium cation has a slightly smaller mass than a sodium atom (since it is missing an electron), this difference will be offset by the fact that a chloride anion is slightly more massive than a chloride atom (due to the extra electron). This approach is perfectly acceptable when computing the formula mass of an ionic compound. Note that the average masses of neutral sodium and chlorine atoms were used in this computation, rather than the masses for sodium cations and chlorine anions. Table salt, NaCl, contains an array of sodium and chloride ions combined in a 1:1 ratio.
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