What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0620 Chemistry papers and filtered to carboxylic acids. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
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What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on carboxylic acids, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Drawing -COOH with two O-H bonds, or with no double bond at all.
- Counting the carboxyl carbon twice, so CH₃CH₂COOH is called butanoic acid.
- Naming the salt of ethanoic acid an ethanate or an ethanoate acid. It is an ethanoate.
- Expecting a gas from the reaction with a base. Only metals and carbonates give one.
- Saying a weak acid is a dilute acid.
- Reversing the ester name, so ethanoic acid plus ethanol is called ethanoyl ethanoate or ethanoic ethyl.
- Leaving water out of the esterification equation.
- Writing the sulfuric acid catalyst in as a reactant.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Carboxylic acids revision notes.