Temperature Help for Chemistry

So I am doing an experiment for chemistry and for one part of the experiment I am supposed to put a string with metal nuts looped around it in boiling water. My teacher is asking me to find the temperature of the water and the nuts in the water. The water was obviously easy because I just put the themometer into the water and it tells me the temp, which came out at 96 degrees. However I have no clue how to find the temperature of the nuts in the water as well. Are they the same as the temperature of the water, or do I have to take them out and place the themometer on it? I am confused and am hoping someone can help me on here to find the temp of the nuts.

The idea is that you leave the metal in long enough so that its temperature becomes the same as the boiling water. So, use 96 C for the metal in your calculations. There is no need to determine the temperature of the metal separately from the boiling water.

What you are doing is determining the specific heat of the metal. Please go here:

http://www.chemteam.info/Thermochem/Dete…

for some discussion and some solved example problems.