• Focuses on carbon-based compounds.
• Why is carbon so special? It has 4 valence electrons → can make 4 bonds.
• Carbon’s party trick: Catenation!
  • This means carbon atoms can link up to form:
    • Straight-chains 📏
    • Branched structures 🌲
    • Cyclic structures 🔄
• Why should you care? Organic compounds are everywhere!
  • Your car's fuel ⛽
  • The colorful dyes in your clothes 👚
  • The cold soda you drink (alcohol) 🍹
  • Essential things like medicines 💊, plastics 🍴, and even DNA 🧬

Ways to represent organic compounds

• Empirical Formula: Shows the simplest ratio of atoms. Imagine a recipe simplified to its most basic form! 🍰
  • Doesn't really give a full picture. It's like knowing the ingredients of a cake but not how to bake it!
• Molecular Formula: Tells you the actual number of atoms. It’s like a detailed ingredient list.
  • Still doesn’t let you picture the final cake. For example: Glucose is C₆H₁₂O₆, but can you visualize its structure just from this? Probably not.
• Structural Formulas: Now we’re talking! It describes how the compound is put together.
  • Full Structural Formula: A 2D doodle of the molecule showing all atoms and bonds.
  • Condensed Structural Formula: Like a shorthand version, with some bonds missing.
  • Skeletal Formula: Super minimalist art! Only shows carbon as lines or vertices, and special functional groups.
    • For example: Imagine a dot-to-dot puzzle, but some dots are special and colored.