Now, long carbohydrate molecules are also known as polysaccharides, and that's because they consist of many individual monosaccharides. So the simplest sugars are called monosaccharides. They consist of a single sugar monomer. Now, why do we call sugars carbohydrates? Well, if we take a look at the empirical formula for carbohydrates, this is what we're going to find. We see that we have carbon, we have H and we have oxygen.