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PPM describes the amount of a substance in a sample.

For example:

If you have one million pounds of goo that is 1 part per million (PPM) GOLD, you would have one pound of gold in the million total pounds of goo.

PPM is typically used to define how much of a pollutant is in a sample of air. If the sample was determined to be 6 ppm hydrocarbon in a sample, that would mean that of the million moles of the sample of air (the weight of the atoms that make up the sample) there would be 6 moles of the hydrocarbon specified, which, depending on the complexity of the hydrocarbon, could end up being one atom of the hydrocarbon in the sample.

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16y ago

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