Question #2ac40

1 Answer
Jan 23, 2018

It's all about the charges.

Explanation:

Note that cadmium nitrate is an ionic compound, meaning the charges have to balance. You can determine this by knowing that cadmium is a metal, and nitrate is a non-metal.

You should be able to find that the charge of a cadmium ion is 2+ and the nitrate ion is 1-

This means that you need 2 nitrate molecules to balance the charge the cadmium cation creates.

From this, you get #Cd(NO_3)_2#

The subscript to the right of the nitrate molecule indicates that there are two of them, which is why parenthesis are needed to be placed around the #NO_3#