thank you so much! how did you figure it out??
Start with carbon, you have 5 carbon on the left so put a 5 in front of the CO.
You have 12 hydrogen on the left, and there is 2 in H2O, so you put a 6 in front of H2O
Now count how many oxygens you have on the right, 5+6=11
This means you need 11 oxygen atoms on the left, but since oxygen is diatomic (O
2) you need 5 and 1 half molecule of O2 to get 11 oxygen atoms.
Now, that is perfectly acceptable, but a lot of people want the coefficients to be whole numbers, so you multiply the 5.5 x 2 to get 11, and multiply everything else by 2.