Inorganic Chemistry. Butterworths Intermediate Chemistry

Butterworths Intermediate Chemistry is a new series of three books— Physical Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry— giving a comprehensive coverage of all modern A-level syllabuses. The treatment is designed to consolidate the student's knowledge after each new topic has been dealt with, by means of concise summaries and pertinent examination questions at the end of each chapter. The authors avoid unnecessary confusion by adopting throughout the latest recommendations on nomenclature of the Association for Science Education. In addition to their particular suitability for students preparing for A-level, the rigorous, modern and concise treatment of the subject that the books provide makes them an ideal introduction for first-year university students and those reading chemistry as a subsidiary subject. Butterworths Intermediate Chemistry Inorganic Chemistry C. Chambers, BSc, PhD, CChem, MRSC Senior Science Master, Bo/ton School A. K. Holliday, PhD, DSc, CChem, FRSC Grant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, The University of Liverpool Butterworth Scientific London Boston Sydney Wellington Durban Toronto All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, without the written permission of the copyright holder, application for which should be addressed to the Publishers. Such written permission must also be obtained before any part of this publication is stored in a retrieval system of any nature. First published in this edition 1982 (Published as Modern Inorganic Chemistry 1975) © Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd 1982 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chambers, C. Inorganic chemistry — (Butterworths intermediate chemistry) 1. Chemistry, Inorganic I. Title II. Holliday, A. K. 546 QD151.5 ISBN 0-408-10822-3 Filmset by Mid-County Press, London SW15 Printed and bound by Mansells Bookbinders Ltd, Witham, Essex Preface This book, the second of three volumes in the new Butterworth Intermediate Chemistry series, is intended as a successor to the authors' previous book Modern Inorganic Chemistry, of which it is in effect a new edition. The new book, like its predecessor, should also be of value in first-year tertiary level chemistry courses. We have tried in the first four chapters — the periodic table; structure and bonding; energetics; and acids and bases with oxidation and reduction —to provide the necessary grounding for the later chapters on the main groups, the first transition series and the lanthanides and actinides. Although a similar overall treatment has been adopted in all these later chapters, each particular group or series has been treated distinctively, where appropriate, to emphasize special characteristics or trends. Most chapters end with a summary and selection of recent questions taken from A-level, Slevel or University of Liverpool first-year examination papers. A major difficulty in an inorganic text is to strike a balance between a short readable book and a longer, more detailed text which can be used for reference purposes. In reaching what we hope is a reasonable compromise between these two extremes, we acknowledge that both the historical background and industrial processes have been treated very concisely. We must also say that we have not hesitated to simplify complicated reactions or other phenomena — thus, for example, the treatment of amphoterism as a pH-dependent sequence between a simple aquo-cation and a simple hydroxo-anion neglects the presence of more complicated species but enables the phenomena to be adequately understood at this level. We are grateful to the following examination boards for permission to reproduce questions (or parts of questions) set in recent years in Advanced level (A), Special or Scholarship (S), and Nuffleld (