Can someone please summarise ions to me simply??!! ?

Question

ok im in year 9, and i have a test tommorow, my friend accidently took all my revision worksheets so now i have nothing to revise from.

I'm having difficulty to understand it all but we've been studying ionic bonding, and the ionic valencys. Can someone please tell me an indepth summary of thses topics and how they relate to eachother in simple terms that i will find easy to understand and remember. I need to know things like charges, the electrons and what happens to them, why it happens etc thankyou for your help(if you answer :P)

Answer 1

Ok, if your in year 9 this is what you will probably need to know.

Ionic valancy is determined by the group on the periodic table, if its in group 3 it has 3 valance electrons. That means it can either gain 5 electrons to be stable or loose 3, and as it is easier to loose 3, it looses 3. Now we have a situation where, in an atom there are an equal number or protons and electrons, but now it has lost 3 electrons, so there are 3 more protons than electrons, this means that, because protons have a posative charge, that the ion will have a charge of +3, like alluminium.

Ionic bonding, is when the ions give there electrons to another ion that wants to GAIN them, so an atom with 5,6 or 7 electrons in its outter shell, and by giving it its electrons, its forms a bond with it, that bond is an ionic bond.

But what if you have alluminium with a charge of +3, and it wants to give its 3 electrons to Iodide with a charge of -1. So aluminium wants to give 3 electrons but iodide only wants 1, what happens then is, the alluminium find 3 iodide ions, and gives one electron to each of them, so theres one aluminum bonded to 3 iodide ions, giving the forumla ALI3.

A good method to find the forumla for an ionic compound is the swap and drop method.

Say aluminum has a charge of +3, and iodide has a charge of 1-, what you do is swap the charges around, and put them down the bottom.

So Al3+I1-, swap the charges, and drop them into the little numbers becomes

I hope that helps.

Al1I3, and because you dont write the one, its AlI3

Answer 2

Wikipedia summarizes it well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion

Maybe skip the parts "Ionization potential" and "Plasma".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionic_bond