Carbon in everyday things

Figure 14.1 shows some materials we use in everyday life.

If you look at the composition of all these materials, what they have in common is that they contain carbon as a component element. Carbon is also plentiful in everything obtained from plants and animals in the environment around us.

Elements combine with one another in many ways to form a huge number of compounds. By far the greatest number of them are compounds formed by carbon combining with other elements. Because carbon compounds are so numerous, and because of the special chemical properties they show, organic chemistry is studied as a separate branch of chemistry.

For ease of study, organic compounds are classified in several ways. One is by the elements they contain. The simplest group of organic compounds is the hydrocarbons, compounds that contain only carbon and hydrogen.

Why carbon makes so many compounds

In grade 10 you saw that a carbon atom has four electrons in its outer shell and forms four covalent bonds, as in methane. What makes carbon special is that its atoms can also bond to one another, again and again, forming chains and rings of any length, with single or double bonds between them. Almost no other element does this so freely. A few carbon atoms and some hydrogen can therefore be arranged in thousands of ways — which is why the fuels, plastics, fabrics and foods of figure 14.1 are all built on carbon.