DefinitionQuestion 1 · Recall
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By the end you can state the two assumptions of the ideal gas model, and explain why real gases only sometimes behave like ideal ones.
"Ideal gas" is not a special kind of gas in a bottle. It is a model — a deliberately simplified picture that makes calculations easy.
The model makes exactly two brave assumptions about the gas particles:
Everything else follows the collision picture from the last lesson: particles in random motion, bouncing elastically off the walls.
Ideal gas
An ideal gas is a gas whose particles have zero volume and no intermolecular forces of attraction between them.
Picture a crowd where every person is a sizeless dot and nobody notices anyone else.
No queuing (no volume), no friendships or shoving (no forces) — they just move and bounce.
That is an ideal gas. Real people take up room and bump into each other; real molecules do too. The model is useful precisely because it is simple, and because for many gases in ordinary conditions it is nearly right.