Organic Compounds Alkanes and Cycloalkanes

According to Chemical Abstracts, the publication that abstracts and indexes the chemical literature, there are more than 18 million known organic compounds. Each of these compounds has its own physical properties, such as melting point and boiling point, and each has its own chemical reactivity. 

Chemists have learned through many years of experience that organic compounds can be classified into families according to their structural features and that the members of a given family often have similar chemical behavior. Instead of 18 million compounds with random reactivity, there are a few dozen families of organic compounds whose chemistry is reasonably predictable. We ll study the chemistry of specific families throughout the rest of this book, beginning in the present chapter with a look at the simplest family, the alkanes. 

The reactions of ethylene and cholesterol with bromine. In both molecules, electrostatic potential maps show similar charge patterns for the carbon-carbon double-bond functional group. Bromine therefore reacts with both in exactly the same way. The size and complexity of the remainders of the molecules are not important. 

TABLE 3.1 Structures of Some Common Functional Croups  

Functional Groups with Carbon-Carbon Multiple Bonds 

---