Bonds Lets Share Nicely

Sometimes when I m cooking, I have one of my chemistry nerd moments and start reading the ingredients on food labels. I usually find lots of salts, such as sodium chloride, and lots of other compounds, such as potassium nitrate, that are all ionically bonded (see Chapter 6). But I also find many compounds, such as sugar, that aren t ionically bonded. 

But many other compounds exist in which electron transfer hasn t occurred. The driving force is still the same achieving a filled valence energy level. But instead of achieving it by gaining or losing electrons, the atoms in these compounds share electrons. That s the basis of a covalent bond. 

Hydrogen is 1 on the periodic table — upper left corner. The hydrogen found in nature is often not comprised of an individual atom. It s primarily found as H2, a diatomic (two atom) compound. (Taken one step further, because a molecule is a combination of two or more atoms, H2 is called a diatomic molecule, ) 

In addition to hydrogen, six other elements are found in nature in the diatomic form oxygen (O2), nitrogen (N2), fluorine chlorine (CI2), bromine (Br2), and iodine (I2). So when I talk about oxygen gas or liquid bromine, I m talking about the diatomic compound (diatomic molecule). 

Comparing coValent bonds (Pith other bonds 

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