Bond Angles

[William Lan 2l]

Do we have to know the bond angles for every single Lewis structure or just the easy ones like how Linear is 180 degrees?

[Rachel Formaker 1E]

We need to know the bond angles for the common VSEPR shapes (linear, trigonal planar, tetrahedral, trigonat bipyramidal, etc).

However, we do not need to memorize the exact values for experimentally determined bond angles, like those resulting from lone pairs "pushing" the bonded atoms closer together.

We should know that these lone pairs cause the bond angles to be smaller than expected because lone pairs have more repulsion, but we don't need to memorize these specific angle values.

[Ryan Sydney Beyer 2B]

We should know the bond angles of the ones that Dr. Lavelle went over in lecture. I think that most of them are fairly easy to figure out in that it is just basic geometry. Like if two atoms are in a line then you know that they are 180 degrees apart from one another just like 3 atoms would be 120 degrees apart from each other. We shouldn't really have to memorize anything just know what would happen if a certain number of atoms are arranged around a central atom. We should also pay attention to what lone pairs due to the bonding angles present in the molecule and usually it makes the bonding angles just a couple degrees less of what they would be if that lone pair was instead replaced by a bond.