Hydrocarbons From Simple to Complex

A natural question chemistry students ask is Why are there so many compounds of carbon The answer Carbon contains four valence electrons and so can form four covalent bonds to other carbons or elements. (A common mistake organic chemistry students make when drawing structures is not ensuring that every carbon has four bonds attached to it.) The bonds that carbon forms are strong covalent bonds (Chapter 7 covers covalent bonds), and carbon has the ability to bond to itself in long chains and rings. It can form double and triple bonds to another carbon or to another element. No other element, with the possible exception of silicon, has this ability. (And the bonds silicon makes aren t nearly as strong as carbon s.) These properties allow carbon to form the vast multitude of compounds needed to make an amoeba or a butterfly or a baby. 

Even compounds containing only carbon and hydrogen have a great deal of diversity imagine what can happen when a few more elements are mixed in  

The simplest of the hydrocarbons are the alkanes. Alkanes are called saturated hydrocarbons — that is, each carbon is bonded to four other atoms. Carbon can form a maximum of four covalent bonds. If those four covalent bonds are to different atoms, then chemists say that the carbon is saturated. There are no double or triple bonds in the alkanes. 

Alkanes have the general formula of CnH2n 2 where n is a whole number. If n = 1, then there are four hydrogen atoms, and the result is CH4, methane. 

See Chapter 7 for a discussion of this stuff, called molecular geometry, ) 

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