Given what you know about the specific heats of various substances, why are pots and pans made of metal? This is because they have

Answer 1

Pots and pans are made of metals and metals generally have very low specific heats.

Looking at the equation:

Let's pretend we have 10000 joules of energy to put into the pan. We'll pretend we have two types of pans, one made of aluminum and one made of wood. We'll assume the mass for both is 1000 g. But the specific heats are way different. The specific heat for aluminum is about 0.89 J/(g•°C) while the specific heat for wood is about 2,38 J/(g•°C)

Let's calculate the temperature change in the two pans

For the wood pan: ΔT = 10000/1000/2.38 = 4.2 °C

For the aluminum pan: ΔT = 10000/1000/0.89 = 11.2 °C

If you had a copper pan, specific heat = 0.386 J/(g•°C), then ΔT = 10000/1000/0.386 = 25.9 °C

So you can see why we want pans with a low specific heat when we are trying to get the food hot.