Carbon is added to iron to make steel. Steel is stronger than either carbon or iron by itself. What does this example show?

This example shows that alloys are stronger than either of it's parent materials by themselves.

Explanation:

Since carbon is added to iron to make steel, it means steel is an alloy of iron and carbon.

This is because an alloy is a mixture of two or more elements, where at least one element is a metal.

Now, steel is stronger than either carbon or or iron by itself because Steel contains atoms of other elements including carbon and iron. These atoms have different sizes to iron carbon atoms, so they distort the layers of atoms in the pure iron and carbon. This means that a greater force is required for the layers to slide over each other in steel, so steel is harder than pure iron.