The Periodic Table & Elements Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which metal has the highest melting point of any, about 3,400 degrees Celsius, which is why it was drawn into the glowing filaments of incandescent lightbulbs, and why it is used for rocket nozzles, welding electrodes and the tips of heavy-duty tools?

Question 2

Which is the most reactive of all the elements and the most electron-greedy, a pale yellow gas that attacks almost every other substance, including water, glass and even some of the supposedly inert noble gases, and killed or injured several early chemists who tried to isolate it?

Question 3

Which hard, bluish-white metal gives 'chrome' plating its mirror shine and rust resistance, and, added to steel at around a tenth by weight, forms an invisible self-healing oxide skin that makes the alloy stainless?

Question 4

Which was the first element to be made artificially, in 1937, from which it takes its name meaning 'artificial', and has no stable form at all, yet one short-lived version of it is the most widely used radioactive tracer in medicine, injected for tens of millions of bone, heart and organ scans a year?

Question 5

Which soft, gold-tinted alkali metal melts just above room temperature, is the most reactive metal that exists in more than trace amounts, exploding on contact with water or even ice, and vibrates at a frequency that has been used since 1967 to define the length of one second?

Question 6

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 7

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?

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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.