Carbon is the only element that gets a whole branch of chemistry to itself. Because carbon atoms can form four strong covalent bonds (including bonds to other carbon atoms), they build chains and rings of almost any size, and that ability makes a near-limitless family of compounds possible. The name organic chemistry comes from the original sources of these compounds: living, or once-living, material. C7 follows that carbon from its biggest modern source, crude oil, through the fuels in cars and aircraft, to the alcohols, acids and polymers that the petrochemical industry builds from it.
How this topic splits by tier and course
C7 (4.7) has the biggest Combined/Triple split of any chemistry topic, so check what you actually need:
- Everyone: sections 1–4: crude oil, hydrocarbons and alkanes, fractional distillation, properties of hydrocarbons and combustion, and cracking (including the bromine water test for alkenes).
- Triple (Chemistry only) T: sections 5–11: the structure and reactions of alkenes, alcohols, carboxylic acids and esters, and all of the polymer chemistry.
- Higher Tier H (within Triple): explaining why carboxylic acids are weak acids (section 8), and the whole of condensation polymerisation and amino acids (section 10).
There is no required practical in C7, but fuels questions love to borrow from other topics: pollutants from burning fuels (C9), energy released by burning fuels (C5) and intermolecular forces (C2) all turn up in organic chemistry questions, and they’re flagged where they do.