What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to nitrogen compounds. 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 nitrogen compounds, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Using aqueous rather than ethanolic ammonia with a halogenoalkane, which hydrolyses it to an alcohol.
- Failing to explain the excess of ammonia, or saying it is to speed the reaction up rather than to limit further substitution.
- Leaving out the NaOH step in the preparation of phenylamine, so the product is the phenylammonium salt.
- Putting phenylamine as a stronger base than ammonia. Delocalisation of the lone pair into the ring makes it much weaker.
- Explaining basicity by the presence of a lone pair without saying how available that lone pair is.
- Letting a diazotisation warm above 10 °C.
- Giving the same products for acid and alkaline hydrolysis of an amide. Acid gives the acid and an ammonium salt; alkali gives the carboxylate salt and ammonia.
- Saying amides are basic because they contain nitrogen. The lone pair is delocalised into the carbonyl.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Nitrogen compounds revision notes.