Every carbohydrate on earth — table sugar, the starch in a potato, the cellulose in celery, the glycogen in your liver — is assembled from the same short list of single sugar rings, joined end to end. What changes is how many rings and which bond holds them together. Climb the ladder to see the structures, then build a chain of your own and watch the arithmetic follow.
Pick a carbohydrate
Simple to complexchoose a rung of the ladder
Chain lengthglucose units, joined end to end1
Monosaccharide1units
Chains longer than 48 units are drawn in part — the arithmetic below is always computed on the full number.