How much does a reaction really produce?

        However accurate your first answer may be, it is not entirely correct because there are always some leftover reactants that were not used in the reaction. When chemical reactions occur, there are often times that there are reactions that do not equal to their mole ratio. An excess reactant is something that is leftover after you have completed your reaction. A limiting reactant is a reactant that is consumed first in a reaction that goes to completion, meaning that it limits the amount of other reactants that can include themselves in a chemical reaction to produce something.

        What you get from stoichiometry equations are called theoretical yield because this is an assumption, or estimation of the product that the reaction will produce, but it is not completely accurate. An actual yield is the measured amount of product actually produced from a given amount of reactant. The actual yield can be much more than the theoretical yield, or much less, or even very similar to it.

        One way to describe reaction efficiency is to find the percent yield, the ratio of actual yield to theoretical yield multiplied by 100. The theoretical yield can be thought of as the maximum amount that any reaction can produce, whereas the actual yield is something that is actually produced. This can be thought of in terms of grades. The highest possible percent in anything is 100, but that is not what you always recieve. At times we get 76 or 82, these things vary. When you put the actual yield over the theoretical yield, you are coming up with an accurate percentage of your product. So if you were to put 76 over 100, you would get 76% and if you tried that with 82, you would have an 82%

  How much can a reaction produce?

  How can stoichiometry be used?