let's compare salt and sugar what's the main difference between them well yes they taste completely different which you'll know if you ever put salt on your pancakes or sugar on your steak but what about on the structural level the difference has to do with the way the atoms are connected we know that table salt is sodium chloride that means it is an ionic solid where positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions form a solid lattice in order to maximize electrostatic interactions between these ions this is a very simple structure since it's just two ions repeating in every direction but sugar is completely different a molecule of table sugar or sucrose does not have any formally charged par particles it contains only neutral atoms that have coent bonds between one another which are represented in this structure by the lines between the atoms these are bonds where two electrons are shared between the two atoms participating in the bond rather than being transferred from one atom to another like when sodium and chlorine come into contact with one another so while salt is an ionic compound sugar is a molecular compound compound whereas there is no distinct salt molecule just a huge grid of repeating formula units there is a distinct sucrose molecule and it looks like this the carbon oxygen and hydrogen atoms which are all neutral are arranged in a specific way with respect to one another and a grain of sugar is comprised of many billions of these molecules packed into a lattice so it has a much more complex structure than Salt does sucrose is an example of an organic molecule which means that it necessarily consists of carbon and can also contain other elements like nitrogen oxygen and other elements from this area of the periodic table which are called nonmetals which tend to form molecular compounds with one another just like sucrose this is in contrast with ionic compounds which tend to form specifically between a metal and a non-metal other ubiquitous molecular compounds include water all the way up to huge biomolecules like proteins and DNA which is so large that we often don't even bother writing the individual atoms when depicting it as we move forward in our learning much or most of the interesting chemistry we learn will have to do with calent bonds and the complex molecular compounds that they form