Glycogen is a polysaccharide.

• A. monosaccharide
• B. disaccharide
• C. polysaccharide
• D. oligosaccharide

Answer: (C)

Glycogen is a polysaccharide because it is a large polymer made up of many glucose monosaccharide units linked together. Each glucose unit is a simple sugar, but when thousands of them are connected, they form a polymer that serves as a storage carbohydrate in animals. The other options describe sugars with far fewer units: a monosaccharide is a single sugar molecule, a disaccharide is two linked sugars (like sucrose), and an oligosaccharide has a few to a dozen sugar units. The defining idea here is that glycogen’s structure involves many glucose units in long chains with branching, which characterizes polysaccharides.