What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9701 Chemistry papers and filtered to analytical techniques. 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 analytical techniques, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Treating this topic as A Level material because of its position in the syllabus. Every objective in it is tiered AS.
- Reading an infrared spectrum as though absorption gave an upward peak. Transmittance falls, so absorption is a trough.
- Confusing the broad O-H of an alcohol with the much broader O-H of a carboxylic acid, or missing that a carboxylic acid shows both O-H and C=O.
- Trying to assign individual bonds in the fingerprint region.
- Taking the tallest peak in a mass spectrum as the molecular ion. The tallest peak is the base peak; the molecular ion is the one at the highest m/e apart from isotope peaks.
- Assuming m/e 43 must be C₃H₇⁺, or that m/e 29 must be C₂H₅⁺. Each has two common identities.
- Inverting the M+1 formula, so that the M abundance ends up on top.
- Forgetting the factor of 1.1 altogether, which gives a carbon count about a hundred times too large.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Analytical techniques revision notes.