What are the formal charges of the atoms shown in red?

Video transcript

Hello everyone today. We are being asked to determine the formal charges of the highlighted elements for the following structure. So first we're going to focus on nitrogen and we can recall that the equation for formal charge is valence electrons, abbreviated as V is going to be subtracted from bonding electrons. Which is going to be subtracted from non bonding electrons here. And so if you look at the periodic table, you know that nitrogen has five valence electrons and we see that it has three bonded electrons and two non bonded electrons to give us a total number of zero. So the formal charge for the nitrogen is zero for the sulfur atom, we use the same equation. We say that formal charges equal to the valence electrons minus bonding electrons minus non bonding electrons. According to the periodic tables, sulfur has six valence electrons. We see that it has 123 bonding electrons. We see that it has two non bonding electrons giving us a positive one charge. So we see that the formal charge for nitrogen is zero and a formal charge for sulfur is positive one. I hope this helped. And until next time.