When you’re looking at gas laws and how pressure, temperature, and volume are related in Chemistry, remembering how they all interact with each other can be difficult. Thankfully, there’s a very, very easy way to remember their relationships without having to remember every detail of Boyle’s law, Charles’s law, and Gay-Lussac’s law. All you need to do is remember the letters
PTV
In alphabetical order.
If you can remember that, you’ll be fine. Here’s how to interpret this three-letter helper:
If two letters are touching each other, they have a direct relationship. That is, pressure and temperature have a direct relationship, and volume and temperature have a direct relationship. That means if one of them goes up, the other will go up, assuming the third variable is held constant. If one goes down, the other will go down.
If two letters are not touching each other, they have an indirect relationship. That is, when pressure or volume goes up, the other will go down, assuming the other variable (temperature) is held constant.