Problem

The safe drinking water standard for arsenic (which is usually found as arsenate, see 4....

The safe drinking water standard for arsenic (which is usually found as arsenate, see 4.115) is 50 parts per billion (ppb) in most developing countries. (a) How many grams of sodium arsenate are in 55 gallons of water, if the concentration of arsenate is 50 ppb? (b) In 1993, naturally occurring arsenic was discovered as a major contaminant in the drinking water across the country of Bangladesh. Approximately 12 million people in Bangladesh still drink water from wells that have higher concentrations of arsenic than the standard. Recently, a chemistry professor from George Mason University was awarded a $1 million Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability for his development of a simple, inexpensive system for filtering naturally occuring arsenic from drinking water. The system uses buckets of sand, cast iron, activated carbon, and wood chips for trapping arsenic-containing minerals. Assuming the efficiency of such a bucket system is 90% (meaning, 90% of the arsenic that comes in is retained in the bucket and 10% passes out of the bucket), how many times should water that is 500 ppb in arsenic be passed through to meet the 50 ppb standard?

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