Describe two precautions that should be taken to ensure an accurate titration.

In any chemical experiment, the purity of your results is heavily dependent on having clean equipment. In the realm of titrations, this becomes critically essential. Residual chemicals from previous use can easily contaminate your titration mixtures, leading to skewed results. This is why, before starting a titration, particular emphasis must be placed on meticulously cleaning the burette, pipette, and conical flask.

Using appropriate laboratory cleaning solutions, followed by thoroughly rinsing with deionized water, removes unwanted contaminants from lab equipment. Especially in burettes and pipettes, it's crucial to ensure no droplets remain as they could dilute your solutions. Always rinse with the solution you will be measuring to condition the equipment and minimize the risk of altering the solution concentration upon transfer. This attention to detail in cleaning translates directly to the precision of your titration data.

Achieving accuracy in titration doesn't only hinge on clean apparatus—it's equally fundamental to use a well-defined titrant. 'Standardizing the titrant' refers to the process of confirming the actual concentration of the titrant solution. This is a crucial step because even a minor discrepancy in the known titrant concentration can lead to a significant error in the final outcome of the titration.

To standardize a titrant, you perform a titration with a primary standard—a substance of high purity, stability, and known concentration. By accurately measuring how much of the titrant is needed to react completely with a known quantity of the primary standard, you can calculate the titrant's exact concentration. Once standardized, this titrant can be used reliably to determine unknown concentrations in subsequent titrations.

A primary standard solution plays a pivotal role in the standardization of titrants. It is a solution with a precise, known concentration that's used as a reference point to gauge the strength of an unknown solution. For a solution to qualify as a primary standard, it must be pure, stable, non-hygroscopic, and have a known stoichiometry with the titrant.

Common examples of primary standards include anhydrous sodium carbonate for acid-base titration or potassium dichromate for redox titrations. Outlined procedures in textbooks and standardized protocols are followed to prepare these primary standard solutions, ensuring high accuracy levels. As it's used to calibrate titrant solutions, the credibility of a primary standard is what gives chemists confidence in the legitimacy of their experimental outcomes.