I am sure you guys have seen this before.



Calcium crystallizes into a face centered cubic unit cell. you know the volume of this unit cell. you have this large block of calcium in which you know its volume as well. How many atoms are in this large block of calcium.


my first move was to just take the large block volume, divide by unit cell volume, and multiply by 4 because 4 cells are in a face centered unit cube. That is dead wrong.



As I have been typing this, I have been pondering about using the masses instead of volume to do this. I already have the density of the calcium unit cell figured out which would obviously be the density of the calcium block as well, and perhaps you can just divide the masses as i had tried dividing volumes (4).

well, i will only have 2 tries after this idea. so i would be thankful for help