 Let's explore some ethanol reactions ethanol is an alcohol which has two carbon atoms at two carbon atoms And it's an alcohol meaning it is functional group is OH So the first one is what happens when it reacts with sodium? Well, the first thing to know is that sodium is a very reactive metal So it is going to go and kick that hydrogen out. So what does it give you? That gives us? CH3 CH2O It kicks out that hydrogen and the NA gets stuck over here and the hydrogen comes out But of course the hydrogen cannot come out as H. You might know the hydrogen comes out as H2 Which means you need to balance this equation. Well, we can just double everything else So what do we get? We get sodium ethanol oxide, sorry, ethoxide sodium ethoxide Ethoxide what do you want to call that and this would be the case for any other alcohol as well If you had three carbon atoms over here, well, you would get the same oxide again sodium oxide would be the three carbon atoms All right now, let's look at the second reaction in this case We're gonna heat ethanol in concentrated sulfuric acid Was it gonna do? Remember that sulfuric acid especially concentrated sulfuric acid acts like a dehydrating agent Dehydrating agent meaning it is excellent at removing water Whenever possible and usually that's what it does with organic molecules. So it's going to remove water from this So H2O water is going to come out. So what is left? Well, if I remove this OH and one more H what I'm left with is CH3 CH right because one hatch from here and OH went out But clearly this can't be the final molecule because this carbon is supposed to have four bonds This carbon does not have four bonds So instead what's gonna happen is that it's gonna redistribute in such a way that you get CH2 and CH2 and you'll end up with a double bond over here in other words you get an Ethene and this is an excellent way to create alkenes So if you want to create alkenes one way to do that is by taking alcohols and Dehydrating it and you can do that by using concentrated sulfuric acid and by heating it to high temperature If you heat it to high temperature the reaction proceeds much faster