Chemistry Orbitals/Shells/Subshells PLEASE HELP

Just finished AS, started A2 last week ( for maths, fm, physics&chemistry), pretty worried about how revising for exams is going to be like this year, having to know 2 years of content for 2 subjects :/, and yourself?

Oh niceeee! You'll probably ace them lol. I'm doing bio/chem/business/ict for AS. I really don't want to drop chemistry but it's just SO HARD same goes for biology oh wellll

Can't speak for biology but chemistry just needs a lot of practice, I'd say it's quite easy to get an A/B but very hard to get over 90%, in our school only 4-5 people got above 90% for the real exams (myself included ) but there were so many people predicted high A's who had achieved low/mid A's or even B's from lack of revision.

Chemistry is very fun but it's also very much a case of 'you get what you put in', so if you're willing to keep up with homework, make notes in spare time (closer to exams), read ahead now and then etc you should be fine. Also bare in mind it's only the second week, you have an entire year to learn and revise this stuff (even 2 years if you aren't doing AS exams in reformed subjects)

Dayyyyum, getting an A must be super hard - I would be happy with a C tbh lol, what exam board do you do?

Yeah I'm just hella scared about what's to come in the course and if it's actually doable


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I do OCR A, I think getting an A this year wasn't that hard, some people in my year got A's that I definitely wouldn't have expected to. If you had decent notes and went through the textbook & revision guides then it wasn't so bad, all the calculation questions were similar to past papers for chemistry so if you practiced those enough it was a lot of easy marks. They had quite a few 1-2 mark questions that required you to apply knowledge in strange ways but if you practice past papers then they aren't too bad (even if you get it wrong its only 1-2 marks).

Like I said earlier you have an entire year to learn and revise these things, just by having the right attitude throughout the year will get you a good grade as you'll have much less work when it comes to revising, which you obviously have because you made this thread when you didn't understand something

I believe 2&3 are right, a 2p orbital can only hold two electrons however. The p subshell contains three p orbitals that each hold two electrons. Any orbital can only hold two electrons and a subshell is a group of orbitals of the same type (either s p d or f)
S subshell - 1 s orbital
P subshell - 3 p orbitals
D subshell - 5 d orbitals

Whaaaaa, but it says maximum number of electrons? I thought p Orbitals can hold 6 electrons? From what I've learnt, within energy levels, there are sublevels (spdf) which are made up of orbitals?? I feel like throwing up, this is soooo hard.

The p subshell (made of 3 p orbitals) can hold 6 electrons yes, but the question is asking about just one of these orbitals rather than the whole subshell.
Lets take the 2nd shell for example, it has an s subshell (containing one s orbital) and a p subshell (containing 3 p orbitals) and each of these orbitals can only hold two electrons at most, regardless of what type of orbital it is.