What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to carboxylic acids and derivatives. 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 and derivatives, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Forgetting the acidification step after oxidising an alkylbenzene, so the product is the benzoate salt.
- Saying every carboxylic acid can be oxidised further. Only methanoic and ethanedioic acid are named.
- Saying methanoic acid gives a negative Tollens' test. It gives a silver mirror, because it contains an aldehyde group.
- Putting phenol as more acidic than a carboxylic acid.
- Explaining acidity by the strength of the O-H bond only, and leaving out the stabilisation of the conjugate base.
- Saying chlorine makes an acid weaker, or that its position along the chain makes no difference.
- Saying alkyl groups withdraw electron density. They donate it, which is why longer-chain acids are slightly weaker.
- Naming an ester the wrong way round, so ethyl ethanoate becomes ethanoyl ethanoate or similar.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Carboxylic acids and derivatives revision notes.