Question

What is an atom that gains or loses an electron and has an electric charge called?

Answer 1

Hint : Basically, atoms have a tendency to gain or lose or share electrons from its outermost shell or we call it a valence shell to get stability. On the basis of these actions there are different types of bonds which take place such as covalent bonds, ionic bonds and many more.

Complete Step By Step Answer:
When an atom gains or loses an electron, it is electrically charged which is known as ion. When an atom gains an electron, it gets negative charge and when it loses an electron it gets positively charged.
It is further known as cation and anion, where anion has negative charge and cation has positive charge.
To understand why we add positive or negative ions to it, if we add an extra electron to an atom it is initially an imbalanced atom that has many negatively charged particles so to balance it out we say it is negatively charged. Similarly, in the opposite sense it happens to be a positively charged action.

Note :
In case, after adding one electron we get a negatively charged atom which we call it anion. If we add one more electron to it then consider the initial atom is $A$ and its anion is ${A^ - }$ after adding one more electron it becomes ${A^{2 - }}$ and further it continues like this.