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!
Let’s understand the most common words you have been hearing the past couple of days that will last towards the end of the semester: Substitution and Elimination ReactionsSo, what are we substituting and eliminating?These terms refer to the halogen and … Read more
In the previous post, we learned that alkyl substituents are the smaller fragments on the parent chain. To name them, we change the suffix (ending) of the corresponding alkane from –ane to –yl. For example: For the methyl … Read more
Have you seen your professor talking about BH₃ and H₂O₂ and not quite understood what it is and when to use it?Ok, so, keeping it simple, we use BH₃ together with a peroxide to place an OH group on the … Read more
Acid chlorides can be reduced to aldehydes by lithium tri(t-butoxy) aluminum hydride (LiAl(OtBu)₃H): So, why not use NaBH₄ or LiAlH₄ for reducing acid chlorides to aldehydes? Remember that acid chlorides are the most reactive derivatives of carboxylic acids, … Read more
Let’s first reveal who this t-BuOK that you see every day is: t-BuOK stands for potassium tert-butoxide, which is the conjugate base of tert-butanol. It features a negatively charged oxygen bonded to a tertiary carbon, making t-BuOK a strong but … Read more
We’ve been covering the key reactions and mechanisms of aldehydes and ketones, how they react with water to form hydrates, with alcohols to give hemiacetals and acetals, with amines to form imines and enamines, and with Grignard and other nucleophiles … Read more
The presence of a lone pair on an atom sometimes brings an exception to the shortcut for determining its hybridization.Recall that for a quick and accurate way of determining the hybridization, we count the steric number of the atom – … Read more
Alcohols can serve both as a nucleophile and an electrophile (substrate) in SN1 and SN2 reactions. However, by themselves, alcohols are not great for any of these reactions because 1) they are weak nucleophiles and 2) the OH is not … Read more
We have learned that to name a molecule, we need to find the parent chain and the smaller carbon fragments known as alkyl groups or substituents, in general. For example, removing one hydrogen from the corresponding hydrocarbon, we get the … Read more
Parent chain is the “main part” of the molecule. Just like a car or a house is the main component, no matter what accessories and decorations we can have on them. For example, suppose we have an infinitely long carbon … Read more
