Question

What is chloride’s charge?

Answer 1

Hint: The chloride ion is an anion formed when the element chlorine gains an electron. An ion is a particle which has a net electrical charge. An anion is a negatively charged ion with more number of electrons than the number of protons.

Complete answer:
The ions which consist of only a single atom are called monatomic ions. The chlorine atom has seven electrons in its valence shell. It needs one more electron to achieve octet configuration and become stable. Thus, a chlorine atom tends to gain one extra electron and attain a stable eight electron configuration. The resultant ion formed is known as the chloride anion. The chloride ion is much larger than a chlorine atom because chloride ions are formed due to gain of electrons. The electrons increase but there are still the same number of protons, so this causes the electrons to not be bound as tightly to the nucleus which results in an increase in size of the chloride ion. As the chloride ion is formed by gaining one electron, it will have a single negative charge. Here the negative charge indicates that gain of electrons took place. The chloride ion is represented as $C{l^ - }$ . Anions are formed when a non-metals gain electrons. They gain one or more than one electron but do not lose any protons. Therefore, they have a net negative charge.
Therefore, chloride’s charge is $ - 1$.

Note:
Remember that anions are larger than their corresponding neutral atoms because adding electrons increases the number of electron-electron repulsion interactions that take place whereas cations are smaller than the corresponding neutral atoms as the valence electrons, which are farther from the nucleus are lost.