Question

What is reduction and reducing agent?

Answer 1

reduction is process were there one compound gets converted from higher valency to lower valency by gaining electrons!!!the electrons donated in this process is called reducing agent !!!

Answer 2

Maybe it helps to remember that the first practical chemistry of the world was the reduction of metal ores to pure metal. You often do this in a furnace, where you "cook" a great deal of ore and added material (e.g. charcoal), and you get out a small amount of hot pure metal. So that should sound a little like a cooking "reduction."

Metals are almost always present on the Earth's crust as their oxides or sulfides, since oxygen is the most common, and sulfur the fourth most common nonmetal other than hydrogen on the surface of the Earth. So iron is present as magnetite (FeO·Fe2O3) or hematite (Fe2O3), copper as chalcocite (Cu2S), tin as cassiterite (SnO2), zinc as smithsonite (ZnCO3), aluminum as bauxite (containing among other things Al(OH)3), and so forth. Both oxygen and sulfur are electron-hungry, and the only way to prise the metal atoms out from their grasp is to supply them with electrons from some other source -- from a reducing agent. Historically, charcoal (elemental C) played that role, because carbon is very willing to share its valence electrons with oxygen, to form CO2. In short, carbon lends electrons to the oxygen, which makes the oxygen willing to give back electrons to the metal cation, which reduces the metal cation to the pure metal.