The Periodic Table & Elements Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, yet was once so hard to extract that it cost more than gold, so that an emperor served his best guests with cutlery made of it and the finished tip of the Washington Monument was cast from it, until an 1886 electrical method made it cheap almost overnight?

Question 2

Which element is one of only two that are liquid at ordinary room temperature, a dense, deep red-brown fluid that gives off a choking, corrosive vapour, and whose name comes from a Greek word meaning stench?

Question 3

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 4

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 5

Which hard, brittle, grey metal is added to almost all steel to mop up sulfur and oxygen and to toughen it, with a high-alloy version, over a tenth of it by weight, so resistant to wear and impact that it is used for railway points, rock crushers and prison bars?

Question 6

Which greenish-yellow, choking, poisonous gas was released from cylinders by German troops at Ypres in 1915 as the first large-scale chemical weapon, yet in tiny, controlled amounts is added to drinking water and swimming pools worldwide because it kills waterborne germs, saving millions of lives?

Question 7

Which is the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust, with less than a gram of it present worldwide at any instant, a halogen so violently radioactive that a weighable sample would immediately vaporise itself with the heat of its own decay, so its bulk properties have never been observed?

Question 8

Which heavy, rare noble gas produces an intense white light in a brief high-voltage flash, making it the gas in camera flashguns, strobe lights and the bright headlamps of some cars, and, despite belonging to the supposedly unreactive group, will form genuine chemical compounds with fluorine and oxygen?

Question 9

Which row of 15 elements, beginning with actinium and printed as a separate strip at the bottom of the periodic table beneath the rare earths, are all radioactive, includes uranium and plutonium, and was recognised as a distinct family only in the 1940s during wartime work on the atomic bomb?

Question 10

What fixes the identity of a chemical element, so that changing it turns one element into another, and its value, running from 1 for hydrogen upward, also sets an element's place in the sequence of the periodic table?

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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.