What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to polymerisation. 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 polymerisation, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Drawing a repeat unit without bonds extending from both ends.
- Including the lost water molecule in the repeat unit, so the atom count is wrong.
- Cutting an ester link in the wrong place when working back to the monomers, so an OH ends up on the wrong fragment.
- Forgetting to add back the elements of water when deducing monomers from a polymer chain.
- Calling a polymer made from a diol and a diacid a polyamide, or one from a diamine an ester.
- Saying condensation polymerisation from an acyl chloride releases water. It releases HCl.
- Predicting addition polymerisation for a monomer with two functional groups and no C=C.
- Saying poly(ethene) is non-biodegradable because it is a long molecule. It is because its backbone has no polar, hydrolysable links.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Polymerisation revision notes.