Science...need help?

Question

why the carbon in CO2 is bonded to only 2 atoms while the carbon in CH4 is bonded to 4 atoms?

Answer 1

You will get a better insight into this when you are exposed to the different bonding mechanisms involving electron structure of the atoms. To put it in simple terms at this stage:

Carbon has four valence bonds (usually) to share with other elements to form a compound.
In the case of CO2, each O uses two of them to give O=C=O.
For CH4, each H requires only one, so four H atoms can attach to make methane (visualize four -H's surrounding the C...difficult to type here)
Carbon can also attach to another carbon plus other elements. This is the major factor in organic chem. For example, in the case of ethane, H3C-CH3, one bond of each carbon is used to attach to the other carbon and the other three bonds attach to H atoms.

Hope this clears up a bit of the mystery temporarily, until you get more deeply into bonding structures.

Answer 2

CO2 only has two atoms to bind with, forming a double bond to each oxygen. CH4 has four hydrogen atoms therefore forming 4 single bonds. Carbon likes to be bonded 4 times either through double bonding or with four atoms

Answer 3

Because the other atoms that bond to CO2 are bonding to the Oxygen molecules. Since there are two, that is how many atoms can bond. In the CH4 atom, there are 4 hydrogen molecules and it can, therefore, bond with 4 other atoms.

Answer 4

Carbon has 4 valence electrons and "prefers" to use each of them when bonding with other elements. Oxygen has six valence electrons. A single carbon can't bind all six of the valence electrons, it can only bind 4 since that's all carbon has to contribute. They way it binds to oxygen, however, is such that each bond is a double-bond. Thus, each carbon can only bind 2 oxygen molecules (this gives each atom an octet of valence electrons, which is stable, but that's beyond this question).

In the case of Hydrogen, which is small, there is only one valence electron. Carbon's 4 valence electrons are able to each bind a single hydrogen, so you get 4 total hydrogens bound to the carbon. They are generally represented as uniformly distributed around the carbon atom.

Answer 5

Carbon, due to it's electronic structure, is usually bonded to 2 to 4 other molecules/groups.

The oxygens in CO2 are doubly bonded to the carbon, so the four valence electrons of carbon are involved in bonds, even though it's not bonded to four different atoms/groups.

Answer 6

Carbon is tetravalent, which means it likes to have four bonds to it, but these bonds can be single bonds (using one of carbon's four available electrons), double bonds (using two) or triple bonds (guess what? using three).

Methane (CH4) has four single bonds, one from each hydrogen to the carbon. The carbon donates one electron to the bond and the hydrogen the other. [Think of the carbon at the center with four single bonds (composed of two electrons each) to the hydrogens around it. (The font here won't let me draw it properly for you.) ]

Carbon dioxide has two double bonds to the oxygens, sort of like

O=C=O

with each double bond involving two electrons from the caron and two from the oxygen.

Both structures use all four of carbon's bonding electrons and complete the octet of electrons around carbon.(First row elecments like to have a total of eight electrons surrounding them in their outer shell.)

Answer 7

They are both 2 different types of carbon. One of them maybe more toxic than the other. It is alos bonded to differrent elements to create a differnet molecule.