Four possible electron configurations for a carbon atom are shown below, but only one schematic represents the correct configuration for a carbon atom in its ground state. Which one is the correct electron configuration?

Video transcript

Hello everyone. So in this video we're going to be dealing with the electron configuration of carbon. So as we know, carbon Has an atomic number of six. So six electrons are. How many electrons that we will input into our electron configuration. So let's remember our electron configuration rules. 1st 1 being the principle What this says is to fill the lowest energy orbital. 1st Basically we have to fill up one s and then to us before due to people and so on. Second rule or second principle is going to be the hunt's rule. What that says is that electron orbital's that are degenerate, so same energy level are half filled before they are totally filled. Alright, so now that we have our rules and principles set, let's go ahead and apply this to our electron configuration. So I'll do it off to the side first and then we can kind of match it up with these choices that are given. So we have our one s to us and two P again we have six electrons that we're gonna use. So 1st 11 s let's see if we can fill up two electrons here on the one S for to us again, we can fill up with two. So we have four total we have two remaining electrons. So we first put one and using the hands roll we move on to the next two. So 123456 total electrons down. And this should be the correct electron configuration now matching it to the given choices from a problem. We see that the first one matches our drawing over here. Therefore, the first answer choice is going to be the correct electron configuration of carbon. Thank you all so much.