3: Review of Chemical Bonding
Learning Objectives
- Be able to draw Lewis dot structures, assign formal charges, predict molecular geometries (including bond angles), and calculate bond orders for molecules, including hypervalent molecules and ions.
- Describe hypervalent molecules using no-bond resonance.
- Understand and articulate how predictions of molecular structure and bonding can be experimentally verified.
- Learn to construct hybrid orbitals from s and p atomic orbitals.
- Use the isoelectronic principle to design new molecules and solids.
- Rationalize bond strength and chemical reactivity using bond polarity arguments.
- Interrelate bond length and bond strength.
There is no topic more fundamental to Chemistry than the nature of the chemical bond, and the introduction you find here will provide you with an overview of the fundamentals and a basis for further study.
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- 3.1: Prelude to Chemical Bonding
- Molecules (and extended solids) are built from atoms that form chemical bonds. Theories of bonding seek to explain why molecules and solids form, what their structures are, why some are more stable than others, and how they react. The theory of chemical bonding has a long history, dating back to ancient Greece and the atomists Democritus, Leucippus, and the Epicureans.