Achieve Question 4

[Angela_Li_1J]

In one of the parts for question 4, it gives a table with bond lengths and asks, "Based on the Lewis structures and the bond length data, select the correct statement or statements." The answer choices are talking about ample bond character and overwhelming bond character, and I'm confused on what those terms mean. What is the question asking?

[Jenny Han 3F]

I believe ample and overwhelming describe the bond character itself: ample would mean that there is a sufficient proportion of that specific bond character, while overwhelming means that there is more of a specific bond character than its alternate bond character (closer to exhibiting a specific bond character than "ample").

[Joelle Tran 1K]

I tried looking around in the book to see if it explains the terms ample and overwhelming in terms of describing bond length, but I found nothing.

The way I interpreted it though is that ample in regular non-chemistry terms means “enough” so the carbon-nitrogen bond is “enough” to match the C-N single bond or C=N double bond character. Then, overwhelmingly C=N bond character would indicate that the carbon-nitrogen bond is extremely close (even closer than ample?) to C-O single bond or C=O double bond character.

[Robert Nguyen 14B-3E]

I am not entirely sure on this, but I believe believe bond "character" would be referring to how much it resembles one bond or the other. With this definition, I believe it asking if it has ample character of the double bond would be saying if the length of the bond was enough in the middle of a single and double bond to be representative of both, and that the overwhelming character would mean the experimental length is much closer to one than another. I think this is important because if it were closer to one than the other, than the resonance structure that has the bonds that the experimental length was not close to would not have as much effect on the real structure, but if they were amply between both values, that structure would have a significant impact on the real structure