Question

How would you write the molecular formula for dinitrogen trioxide and nitrogen monoxide?

Answer 1

Hint: The answer for this question is based on the name given that is the prefixes like ‘di’ which means two and ‘tri’ which is three and so on and writing these as suffixes in form of number gives the required answer.

Complete answer:
In the lower classes of chemistry, we have studied about the basic concepts of writing the molecular formula based on the names given and also on the basis of common names.
Let us now see how we can write the molecular formula of the given compound based on the name given.
- The name of the compounds is given in the form of prefixes and let us now write the name of the compound accordingly.
- Here, according to the IUPAC rule, the prefixes for the molecules are given where mono means one atom, di mean two atoms, tri means three and so on.
- These prefixes in the name are written in the form of suffix while writing the molecular formulas.
- Now, the given two compounds can be written as shown below,
Dinitrogen trioxide – The name has the suffix di for the nitrogen atom which means two nitrogen atoms are present and trioxide means three oxygen atoms. This can be written as,${{N}_{2}}{{O}_{3}}$
Nitrogen monoxide – Here, the name says that both oxygen and nitrogen are the single atoms and therefore can be written as,$NO$

Note:
Note that the prefixes bis, tris etc. are used when there are two molecules of oxides or hydroxides or any other diatomic compounds which already have the prefixes di, tri in them. This should not be confused with the common prefix di, tri, tetra etc.