The unit in one line
Carbon compounds by functional group: how each is made, how each reacts, and which test tells it from its neighbours. 17 of Chemistry's 50 questions over eleven chapters, the joint-heaviest unit in the subject.
Read in this order
The order matters more here than anywhere else in chemistry: each group is defined by reactions the group before it explains.
- General organic chemistry (10 min) — naming, isomerism, and the reactive intermediates with their stability orders. Read this first whatever else you skip; the rest of the unit speaks its language.
- Hydrocarbons (10 min) — alkanes, alkenes and alkynes with their preparations and additions, Markovnikov and the peroxide effect, and petroleum.
- Aromatic hydrocarbons (8 min) — aromaticity, electrophilic substitution through the arenium ion, and the directing groups.
- Haloalkanes and haloarenes (10 min) — SN1 against SN2, the substitution table, chloroform and chlorobenzene.
- Alcohols and phenols (12 min) — the distinguishing tests, the ethanol grades, and why phenol is an acid.
- Ethers (8 min) — Williamson's synthesis and which side cleaves with hydrogen iodide. Short, and it depends on chapter 4.
- Aldehydes and ketones (10 min) — nucleophilic addition, the relative reactivity order, and the seven distinguishing tests.
- Carboxylic acids and their derivatives (13 min) — acidity and its substituent effects, and the acyl reactivity ladder.
- Nitro compounds (9 min) — nitrobenzene and the six products its reduction gives, one per medium.
- Amines (13 min) — basicity in water against the gas phase, telling the three classes apart, and diazotisation.
- Organometallic compounds (9 min) — the Grignard reagent and what each partner gives after hydrolysis.
About 110 minutes in all. Chapter 11 is worth reading immediately after chapter 5: most of what a Grignard reagent is for is making alcohols.
How it is asked
MEC sets the paper roughly half recall, a third understanding and a fifth application. Recall is a named reaction and its reagent — Rosenmund, Cannizzaro, Hofmann, Sandmeyer. Understanding is an order and its reason: why a tertiary halide goes by SN1, why an amide is the least reactive acyl derivative, why a nitro group directs meta. Application is a sequence run forwards or backwards: give this compound these three reagents in turn and name the product, or work out which alkene was ozonolysed to give these two carbonyls.
Then practise
Each chapter has a fixed-length chapter test under Practice › Topics, drawn from questions written to that chapter's scope. Sit it after reading; a second sitting a week later shows whether it stuck.