What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to group 2. 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 group 2, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Saying thermal stability decreases down the group. It increases.
- Explaining thermal stability by the strength of the bond between the cation and the anion, rather than by polarisation weakening a bond within the anion.
- Saying a larger cation polarises more. Polarising power depends on charge density, which falls as the ion grows.
- Forgetting that the nitrate decomposition also gives oxygen, or giving NO rather than NO₂ as the brown gas.
- Giving the same solubility trend for the hydroxides and the sulfates. They run in opposite directions.
- Explaining a solubility trend by referring to only one of the two energy terms. The trend is set by which changes faster, so both must be mentioned.
- Saying the hydration enthalpy of the anion changes down the group. The anion is the same throughout; only the cation changes.
- Writing "the lattice energy increases down the group" without saying whether that means a larger or a smaller magnitude, when the values are negative.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Group 2 revision notes.