The Periodic Table & Elements Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which bright yellow, brittle non-metal, known since ancient times as brimstone and often found around volcanic vents, is burned to make the world's most produced industrial chemical, a strong acid, and is used to toughen rubber in a process called vulcanisation?

Question 2

Which metal is as strong as many steels but around 45 percent lighter, does not corrode even in seawater or the body, and so is used for aircraft, submarines, spectacle frames, and surgical implants such as hip joints and dental screws, which bone will bond directly to?

Question 3

Which magnetic metal has been used for over a thousand years to colour glass and ceramic glazes a deep, rich blue, as in Chinese porcelain and Delftware, and today is in demand for the electrodes of lithium-ion batteries and for the super-alloys of jet engine turbine blades?

Question 4

Which element was the first to be discovered by a named individual, a German alchemist who in 1669 boiled down large quantities of urine hoping to make gold, and whose white form glows faintly in the dark and bursts into flame in air, so it must be kept under water?

Question 5

Which dense, silvery-white precious metal is so unreactive that it does not tarnish or dissolve in most acids, and is used for laboratory crucibles, fine jewellery, and above all as the catalyst in vehicle exhaust converters that turn engine pollutants into less harmful gases?

Question 6

Which metal is so unreactive that it does not tarnish or corrode, keeping its shine indefinitely, and is the most malleable of all elements, so that a single gram can be beaten into a sheet about a square metre in area and thin enough to see through?

Question 7

What is the term for the different structural forms in which a single pure element can exist, with the same atoms bonded in different arrangements giving very different properties, as with diamond and graphite, or with ordinary oxygen and ozone?

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About The Periodic Table & Elements

Everything you can touch, breathe or see is built from about ninety naturally occurring chemical elements, plus a couple of dozen more made only in laboratories. The periodic table is the single diagram that organises them all, and this quiz is a tour of about eighty elements, groups, properties and the people who worked them out. Each question describes one, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains what it is, where it turns up, how it behaves and the memorable fact or the myth attached to it.

It moves between the individual elements and the ideas that connect them. On the elements: hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang; the reactive alkali metals kept under oil; the near-inert noble gases; carbon and its many faces; the metals that built the ages, copper, iron, aluminium, titanium, tungsten; the two that are liquid at room temperature; the poisoners, arsenic, thallium, polonium; the radioactive giants, uranium, plutonium, radium; and the oddities, gallium that melts in your hand, bismuth with its rainbow crystals, francium of which barely a spoonful exists on Earth.

On the ideas: what an atomic number really is and why Moseley's X-rays made it the right way to order the table; isotopes, allotropes, ions; groups, periods and blocks; valence electrons, the octet rule and electronegativity; the metalloid staircase; the lanthanides and actinides pulled out below; the transuranium elements and the predicted island of stability. And the history: Lavoisier defining an element and losing his head, Mendeleev leaving gaps and filling them by prediction, the Curies boiling tonnes of ore, Seaborg with an element named after him while he lived.

Because photographs of element samples usually do not give away which element they show, most metals looking much alike, questions carry a picture wherever one helps; the visually unmistakable ones, gold, copper, mercury, sulfur, are left as text. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.

The eighty questions are split into three packs. The first is a run through the elements almost everyone has heard of, and the handful of ideas needed to read the table at all: what an atomic number is, what an isotope is, what a group and a period are. The second pack is the widest, forty questions ranging over working metals and their alloys, the poisoners and the precious metals, the reactive alkali metals and halogens, the noble gases, the rare earths, and the radioactive and synthetic elements out at the far end. The third gathers the connecting ideas and the people: valence electrons and the octet rule, electronegativity and ions, allotropes and the periodic law, the lanthanides and actinides, the transuranium elements and the theorised island of stability, and the chemists from Lavoisier and Mendeleev to Moseley, the Curies and Seaborg. Answers are always a single name, chosen from four, so nothing turns on spelling or chemical formulae.