Nonmetals gain electrons under certain conditions to attain a noble gas electron configuration. How many electrons must be gained by the element hydrogen (H) to attain noble gas electron configuration?

1

Explanation:

For non metals to attain a noble gas configuration, they gain the number of electrons needed to attain the noble gas configuration of the noble gas at the end of their periods. This means that these non metals would only take up the configuration of the last element on their periods which of course is always a noble gas.

The last element on the hydrogen period or more conservatively the only other element on the hydrogen period is helium, with an atomic number of 2. The atomic number is the number of protons in he nucleus of an atom. For an electrically neutral atom, the number of electrons equal the number of protons.

Hence we can deduce that helium has 2 electrons while hydrogen has one electron. Thus for it to attain the configuration of helium, it just needs to gain one more electron