Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2025/6/a/iv/solution

Allen electronegativity is proportional to the average binding energy of the free ground-state atom's valence electrons. For an s,p main-group atom, use positive, spectroscopically inferred one-electron binding energies and their occupancies :
Here fixes the conventional scale; the one-electron energies are obtained from appropriate atomic ionization/term energies, not merely from the first ionization energy. For group 15 the weighted average is .[ref]
The approximate connection to effective nuclear charge is . At a fixed shell, stronger effective nuclear attraction generally raises the valence binding energies and therefore Allen electronegativity. Down a group, increasing shell size and changes in penetration offset that attraction. There is no universal relation across different shells, nor can one substitute a core-electron for the valence average.

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