Question

Is alcohol a hydrocarbon?

Answer 1

Hydrocarbons, as the name suggests, are the compounds of carbon and hydrogen. Both these elements readily undergo combustion.

Complete step-by-step answer: Hydrocarbons are the major source of fuel. Long back, people used wood and coal as the main fuels. They had a lot of pollution problems and were also quite difficult as well as inconvenient to handle. The hydrocarbons have solved most of our problems. LPG (Liquefied petroleum gas) and CNG (Compressed natural gas) are extremely popular names with which every one is familiar. Another fuel, LNG (Liquid natural gas) has been developed quite recently. All of them are obtained either directly or indirectly during the mining of petroleum as well as by carrying out its fractional distillation. Both kerosene and diesel undergo incomplete combustion and release a lot of unburnt carbon particles into the atmosphere as smoke thereby creating pollution problems. The combustion of petrol and also of CNG is complete and these are commonly used as fuels in automobiles. Unsaturated hydrocarbons like ethylene and propylene upon polymerisation form a number of useful polymers like low density and high density polyethene, polypropene, polystyrene etc. which have a wide range of applications. Aromatic hydrocarbons are used in the synthesis of many dyes and drugs. In the study of the nomenclature of organic compounds, we have come across two types of hydrocarbons i.e., open chain and cyclic. The open chain hydrocarbons have been classified into saturated (alkanes) and unsaturated (alkenes and alkynes).
So alcohol is a derivative of hydrocarbons .

Note: The cyclic hydrocarbons are alicyclic as well as aromatic in nature. All the hydrocarbons differ with respect to the nature of bonding in the carbon atoms and hence differ in characteristics also.