Login
Accessing this course requires a login. Please enter your credentials below!
Hey there! Looks like you came across a Members-Only section.
Quizzes, Practice Workbooks, and Answer Keys, plus some tutorials are only accessible to Organic Chemistry Tutor members.
I don’t know if I missed something but I am very confused about the first section. How are we supposed to know when we combine carbon and hydrogens together and how to make those specific binds? I thought we were just supposed to either connect the carbons to be cyclic or keep them linear – there are different ways to connect them.
The problem with the constitutional isomers is that we don’t have to keep them linear or cyclic–you can have any number of possible combinations. And for as long as you have no charges, full octets, and all bond satisfied, you have a valid structure. The more different atoms you have, the more possible variations you’re going to have. We also can’t easily predict the number of possible constitutional isomers. That’s why these questions get quite ridiculous very quickly with the number of possibilities growing exponentially. That’s why in the first part I just gave a few options. You might have different options and that’s perfectly fine. The questions where you need to come up with all possible isomers have all possible answers (unless I forgot any 😅).