Balancing equations is not terribly difficult but is rather annoying. We can assure you that you’ll be shouting “damn you carbon dioxide, why won’t you balance!? If you don’t hurry up and balance; I’ll punch the oxygen right out of you and force him to bond with a smelly sulphur atom!”

In essence, all you have to do to balance an equation is make sure that you have the same number of atoms on each side of the equation.                                                                      

The first thing that we have to do is count the number of atoms of one substance on each side of the equation.                                                                                                                    Take a look at this equation:

 As you can see there are more oxygens on the left than the right. So what you do is multiply the water by 2 so that way you get 2 oxygens. You do this by adding a 2 before the H₂O.

 Unfortunately, now there are four hydrogens on the right than on the left. This means you have to add a 2 in front of the H₂, so it’s multiplied by 2, and thus, makes 4 hydrogens.

 Let’s look at the carbon atoms in this equation:

 On the left hand side of the arrow we have two carbon atoms and we have one carbon atom on the right hand side. What we need to do is balance the carbon atoms. To do this we add in a two before the carbon the right which multiplies everything in the molecule by two (2CO₂ has 2 carbons and 4 oxygens). This would give:

 The carbon is now balanced. Now we need to look at the hydrogen. We have four hydrogens on the right and two on the left. If we multiply the water on the right by 2, we will have 4 hydrogens and 2 oxygens. This would give:

 Then go over and count up to check it is correctly balanced. Occasionally it may take a little scoring out and starting again when balancing but that one was an easier example. Here is one that is a little harder.