The only way of mastering any topic in Organic Chemistry is doing lots of practice problems. And I know, seeing my students, that starting to work on a practice problem may be the hardest part as you don’t know where to start. It is difficult to visualize what where the double bond would be moved if you follow the five curved arrows crammed in one step. Here is the trick:
We are always told to think before doing something. Fair enough. But let me tell you, it is also strangely enough, that in Organic Chemistry, it is often better to draw and then think about what you did (not in the lab though). It is much easier to have a structure in front of you and check for errors and improvements.
Do the first step, take the pencil and you will see that the ball gets rolling.
You have all these Organic Chemistry Practice Problems waiting to be solved!
Acid-Catalyzed hydration is the addition of water to an alkene, which forms an alcohol. Overall, it is an electrophilic addition reaction in which both the alkene and water act as nucleophiles at different stages of the mechanism. The … Read more
We learned earlier that according to Markovnikov’s rule, the addition of an HX acid to an alkene produces the more substituted alkyl halide as the major product: Interestingly, in the presence of peroxides, HBr forms the less substituted … Read more
How to Convert the OH into a Leaving Group In many cases, when students are asked to convert an alcohol to an alkyl halide, they would use the corresponding halide and show the reaction with an SN2 mechanism:The result is … Read more
Let’s state the objective of this post right away. We need to explain why the following reaction produces one of the alkenes as the major product: This preference for addition to alkenes was first explained by Markovnikov and … Read more
Is it an SN1 or SN2 mechanism? If you are asked to determine whether the nucleophilic substitution goes through an SN1 or SN2 mechanism, look at the following criteria in the given order: 1) Check the substrate (alkyl halide most … Read more
Now that you have learned about the SN1 and SN2 mechanisms, try to draw a reasonable mechanism for the following substitution reaction: Wait, this doesn’t make sense, right? The nucleophile suddenly appears where there was no leaving group… … Read more
Choosing between SN1, SN2, E1 and E2 In the previous posts, we discussed choosing between SN1 and SN2, as well as SN1, SN2, E1, and E2 mechanisms. The main focus here was on the substrate and the strength of the … Read more
In the previous post, we talked about the mechanism, kinetics, reactivity, rearrangements, and some more features of the SN1 reaction. The SN1 Nucleophilic Substitution Reaction You can go over those before solving the practice problems shown below.
