Why is it necessary to use a graph to determine the maximum temperature rather than its raw data?

Question

It's for general chemistry. 

Answer 1

It's hard to give a general answer without knowing your experimental set-up, but I'm guessing that there's a kinetic component that's easier to view graphically. A couple of possibilities for this:

1) your containment vessel slowly loses sensible heat to the environment, so that you can extrapolate that ~ linear drop rate back to t=0 to better determine the .delta.H -OR-

2) your heat exchange from the reaction vessel out into the containment vessel is slow, so that (for reasons of speed) it's preferable to take enough data to be able to model this as an exponential-decay approach to a final temperature, without waiting around for this to run all the way to completion!

There may be other possibilities, but I think these are the major ones. Think about your apparatus, and decide what applies to you! Another possibility, come to think about it, might be that a stirrer provides a constant heat input rate, which you also negate by extrapolating back to t=0.

Cheers!

Answer 2

The graph will show you the peaks and trends in the raw data. This allows you to then use the raw data for actual applications instead of guessing.