CALM Chap9 Quest.4

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I don't understand how you find the number of bonding electrons and the number of antibonding electrons....I can't tell the difference...and how do you know which resonance form is most important...the book is NOT helping at all....

-- Anonymous, April 20, 2000

Answers

I had a lot of problems with this one, but this is how my TA described what average bond order means:

Take for example, NO3-. If you do the lewis dot structure, you'll notice it's a resonance structure. For NO3-, one oxygen atom binds to the central nitrogen atom by a double bond, and the other two oxygens bind to the nitrogen by single bonds. That means there's 4 bonds total (double bond + 2 single bonds), with 3 "connections" (connection means the number of atoms bounded to the central atom).

Average bond order = (Total bonds) / (number of "connections") For NO3-, it would be 4 / 3.

I tried plugging in 4/3, but you can't do that like you can in WebWork. Instead the decimal equivalent, 1.33333 works.

I hope that helped.

-- Anonymous, April 20, 2000


I'm also having trouble. I've tried several different examples of this problem using Justin's suggested method, but it hasn't worked for me so far. I draw the Lewis dot structure, count the number of bonds, and divide it by the number of connections. For ClO4- I get the answer 1. What am I doing wrong??

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2000

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