What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to organic synthesis. 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 organic synthesis, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Writing a route without reagents or conditions, which earns almost nothing however correct the sequence.
- Changing the number of carbon atoms without a nitrile step, or using KCN and forgetting that the chain has grown.
- Treating an OH on a benzene ring as an alcohol, so it is oxidised or esterified by the usual alcohol reactions.
- Treating a chlorine on a ring as a halogenoalkane, so a route hydrolyses chlorobenzene to phenol.
- Nitrating before oxidising when the target is a 3-substituted benzoic acid.
- Forgetting the NaOH step after reducing nitrobenzene.
- Letting a diazotisation run above 10 °C.
- Distilling when refluxing is needed, or refluxing when the aldehyde must be distilled off.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Organic synthesis revision notes.