In principle, there is nothing wrong with basic questions. They should not be classifiable as homework as per the current homework policy, and there have been some reservations against amirite (am I right?) questions because they feel so … Well, just check out the discussion.
That having said, I have also noticed that this site has a relatively poor (by Stack Exchange standards) answering quota. Two other sites I regularly frequent — German.SE and Travel.SE — both have a $100~\%$ answer rate (ranking 5th and 11th, respectively, across the entire network). Chemistry.SE is sitting at an $81~\%$ answer rate — 116th of 162 sites. However, all of these sites still beat the ‘big three’ with $79~\%$ (SF), $72~\%$ (SO) and $68~\%$ (SU). So depending on which site you’re used to, Chemistry.SE either has a lot of answered questions or a rather low answering rate.
So why do people not answer? There are plenty of reasons:
Some might feel just by looking at the title that the question looks ‘too simple’ and that answering will give them personally too little merit. I know I am guilty of leaving quite a few on-topic questions that I could have answered but felt it wasn’t worth it.
Some questions just get low views in general, thus answers to those questions also only get few votes. For those who were captured by SE’s gamification model — like me — the ‘more interesting’ questions may prove more rewarding.
Some users who wouldn’t be covered with the points above may just have missed the question. We have about 27 new questions per day and numerous edits (and answers) to old ones. Not everybody does what I do and at least skims over all the titles of newly active questions since their last visit. Thus, a question could have simply stayed below their radar.
You probably won’t get the types covered in bullet points 1 and 2 to answer your question unless you offer a bounty — the canonical way to draw attention to your question. However, not everybody has unlocked the bounty offering priviledge and some may desire to keep their reputation. Not everybody is like me, frequently bountying questions with medium to high amounts because they have too much rep.
There’s another strategy, however. I think, very many users here will use the active tab when browsing questions. This not only has the benefit of the community user bumping unanswered questions to the top every now and again, but also means that any edit you perform will equally bump your question. If you use this sparingly, it can give you the visibility you desire. Try using different days of the week and different times of day for bountying — remember that our users come from all over the globe. When editing in this manner, do attempt to make it better every time as well as possible.
You may find that one of the power users has already edited the odd question of your’s to include MathJax, correct the tags, improve the title, wording or grammar. If that happens, at least try to leave their edits untouched and turn to parts of the question they missed — or add a new sentence or something. Otherwise, it may lead to frustration.
I mentioned it before and I’ll mention it again. Using edits to bump one’s question should be used sparingly.
