Question #45ac8

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Truong-Son N.
Oct 4, 2015

Electrophile, Nucleophile.

Oxygen is a good electron-withdrawing group due to its high electronegativity of about #3.5#, and so it creates a dipole moment in the carbonyl that makes the carbon partially positively charged. This makes it susceptible to interaction with a negatively charged particle, such as the electrons in a nucleophile that has a lone pair of electrons to donate, whether it is neutral or anionic.

Here is an example of a carbonyl reaction mechanism, where a ketone gets reduced into an alkane using hydrazine, #"H"_2"NNH"_2#, in the presence of base, which in this case is #"OH"^(-)#:

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