A chemist is designing a synthetic route for a new medicine and must select a carbon compound as the starting material. Which property of carbon allows it to form a wide variety of organic molecules suitable for this task?
Carbon's ability to form four strong covalent bonds
Carbon has atomic number 6 and four valence electrons, so it is tetravalent: it forms four covalent bonds by sharing electrons with other atoms.
Because its atoms are small, these bonds are strong and stable, allowing carbon to bond with other carbon atoms (catenation) and with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, halogens and more, giving chains, branches and rings of enormous variety.
Carbon neither gains nor loses electrons easily, and double bonds with oxygen are only one small class of its compounds, so these cannot explain the variety of organic molecules.
Hence, the answer is Carbon's ability to form four strong covalent bonds.
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