[Lozia]

Hi all.

Been set some work where I'm given a list of reactions and I have to work out the products and types of reactions etc.

Now, i've been looking at the questions (12 of them )for the past couple of hours and doing some searching on the web and im none the wiser as to how you do it.

An example would be:

1-pentene + hydrogen peroxide + sodium hydroxide

Now, a)how do i know what the products will be, and b)Know what type of reaction it is?

Thanks for any help.

[ARGOS++]

Dear Lozia,

Sorry I have missunderstud your question! 
Good Luck!
                    ARGOS⁺⁺

[Lozia]

What bit did you not understand?

I mean it like:

1-pentene + hydrogen peroxide + sodium hydroxide ---------> ? +? etc

I just don't undersatnd how you work the reactants out.

[sjb]

In general, what you do is focus on the functional groups in the molecule at hand and see how they react with the specified compounds.

So, you have an olefin, how do these react with peroxide, then in turn how do these react with hydroxide?

Of course, these had to be worked out a while back from scratch using spectroscopic techniques and the like, but at this level the reactions are fairly infallible and don't give (significant) amounts of byproduct.

S