R. Sanjeev^1,, V. Jagannadham², Adam A Skelton¹, R. Veda Vrath³

The textbook followed by freshmen engineering students (at least in reputed universities of India), is “Elements of Physical Chemistry,” by Peter Atkins and Julio de Paula. Considerable amount of chemical kinetics is dealt in this book, but negative order and fractional orders, which are fundamental for the complete comprehension of chemical kinetics, are not dealt conceptually in this book. The same is the case with other standard text books meant for freshmen undergraduate students. Many a time, even after grappling with complex problems in accounting of rate laws, students do not understand the precise conceptual meaning of these terms. The conspicuous absence of conceptual explanations of these terms in the freshmen text books has prompted us to write this article. The authors are of the opinion that, after going through this article one would definitely feel that, this article is a silver bullet for the conceptual comprehension of the terms negative order and fractional orders in the field of chemical kinetics.

order, elementary reaction, sensitivity, negative order of reaction, fractional order of reactions