You may have heard that carbon is the element of life. What does that mean? Let's find out!

The words natural and synthetic are thrown around a lot these days, when talking about foods, medicine, and other things. But what do they really mean, and how are they different? Is one necessarily better than the other? Can the...

A portion of our culture distrusts the scientific method, assuming that there are transcendent truths unknowable by science. But nothing is truly out of bounds for science. If it's real, it can be studied, and tested. Perhaps the...

What's with this hierarchy? Primary, secondary, tertiary... can't all carbons be equal? Well, no. We need to be able to label the degree of substitution of any carbon in an organic molecule so that we can make predictions about the...

We learned about how pairs of protons can have specific relationships. They can be homotopic, enantiotopic, diastereotopic, or heterotopic. Let's apply this to some examples!

For this one we will have to know what epoxides do! It's a pretty neat little mechanism.

You gotta know your EAS reactions for this one! Make sure you do them in the right order, too.

How can we go from one type of alkene to another? In three steps precisely? Use the reactions you know and figure it out! (Hint: Think about addition reactions, elimination reactions, and hydrogenations!)

For this one we need to know the ability of different reducing agents to react with various functional groups.

Everyone has heard of the idea that some of us are "left-brained", meaning more analytical or mathematical in thinking, while some of us are "right-brained", meaning we are more creative or artistic. Here's the thing: It's rubbish! The...

For this one we need to know what happens to alcohols under acidic conditions. Beware of tricky carbocations!

For this one we will need to understand the basics about Bronsted-Lowry acid-base reactions, and we also should be able to gauge the stability of various potential conjugate bases.

We know about the products of these reactions, but how fast do they go? Give these a shot.

For this one we will want to recall some of the rules about doing E2 on a cyclohexane ring, as well as the relative stabilities of cyclohexane chairs. Combining concepts! Predicting kinetics!

Acids! Bases! Conjugate acids! Conjugate bases! We definitely have to be able to label such things, and we should also know how to state which direction in an acid-base equilibrium is preferred. To do this we should know how to tell...

Ozone isn't just for shielding us from harmful UV radiation! It's a handy-dandy synthetic tool. Try these on for size.

Lisa is moving again already! I dunno, I think there were bedbugs. This time you have a different plan, but you will still need kinematics and Newton's laws to find out how much time and effort stand between you and more snacks. Give it...

For this one we need to understand what the different parameters on an energy diagram correspond to. Check out my tutorial on this subject in the general chemistry playlist if it seems fuzzy!

We've got a starting material, and we are subjecting it to a series of three reaction conditions. What do we get? See if you can find out!

For this one we need to understand the stereospecificity of hydrogenation over platinum metal, stereochemical relationships, and the relative stability of cyclohexane chair conformations.

Grignards are all over the place! Better make sure we can draw the correct products of Grignard reactions. Try these for practice.

We are starting with benzene, we do four reactions, and what do we get? See if you can get the right answer!

Enolate chemistry is tricky business! You might get more products than you think. Give this one a shot.

We've got starting material and we've got a target molecule, and we've gotta figure out how to make the transformation in just two steps. Sift through that bag of synthetic tricks!