Color Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz with answers about color.

Color Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is color?
A: Color is the characteristic of human visual perception described through color categories, with names such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple.

This perception of color derives from the stimulation of what?
A: Cone cells in the human eye by electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum.

Color categories and physical specifications of color are associated with objects through the wavelength of the light that is what?
A: Reflected from them.

This reflection is governed by the object's physical properties such as what?
A: Light absorption, emission spectra, etc.

When the wavelength is within the visible spectrum (the range of wavelengths humans can perceive, approximately from 390 nm to 700 nm), it is known as what?
A: "visible light".

Most light sources emit light at many different what?
A: Wavelengths; a source's spectrum is a distribution giving its intensity at each wavelength.

The familiar colors of the rainbow in the spectrum include all those colors that can be produced by visible light of a what?
A: A single wavelength only, the pure spectral or monochromatic colors.

The color table should not be interpreted as a what?
A: A definitive list—the pure spectral colors form a continuous spectrum, and how it is divided into distinct colors linguistically is a matter of culture and historical contingency.

A common list identifies how many main bands?
A: Six, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

Newton's conception included what seventh color?
A: Indigo, between blue and violet.

It is possible that what Newton referred to as blue is nearer to what today is known as what?
A: Cyan, and that indigo was simply the dark blue of the indigo dye that was being imported at the time.

Physically, objects can be said to have the color of the light leaving their surfaces, which normally depends on what?
A: The spectrum of the incident illumination and the reflectance properties of the surface, as well as potentially on the angles of illumination and viewing.

Some objects not only reflect light, but also what?
A: Transmit light or emit light themselves, which also contributes to the color.

Light arriving at an opaque surface is either reflected "specularly" (that is, in the manner of a mirror), scattered (that is, reflected with diffuse scattering), or what?
A: Absorbed – or some combination of these.

Opaque objects that do not reflect specularly have their color determined by what?
A: Which wavelengths of light they scatter strongly.

If objects scatter all wavelengths with roughly equal strength, they appear what?
A: White.

If they absorb all wavelengths, they appear what?
A: Black.

Opaque objects that specularly reflect light of different wavelengths with different efficiencies look like mirrors tinted with colors determined by what?
A: Those differences.

An object that reflects some fraction of impinging light and absorbs the rest may look black but also be what?
A: Faintly reflective; examples are black objects coated with layers of enamel or lacquer.

Objects that transmit light are either translucent (scattering the transmitted light) or what?
A: Transparent (not scattering the transmitted light).

If they also absorb (or reflect) light of various wavelengths differentially, they appear tinted with a color determined by what?
A: The nature of that absorption (or that reflectance).

Objects may emit light that they generate from having excited electrons, rather than what?
A: Merely reflecting or transmitting light.

To summarize, the color of an object is a complex result of its what?
A: Its surface properties, its transmission properties, and its emission properties.

These properties all of contribute to the mix of wavelengths in the light leaving what?
A: The surface of the object.

The perceived color is then further conditioned by what?
A: The nature of the ambient illumination, and by the color properties of other objects nearby, and via other characteristics of the perceiving eye and brain.

Although Aristotle and other ancient scientists had already written on the nature of light and color vision, it was not until whom that light was identified as the source of the color sensation?
A: Newton.

The ability of the human eye to distinguish colors is based upon the varying sensitivity of different cells in the retina to what?
A: Light of different wavelengths.

It has been estimated that humans can distinguish roughly how many different colors?
A: 10 million.

The other type of light-sensitive cell in the eye, the rod, has a different what?
A: Response curve.

In normal situations, when light is bright enough to strongly stimulate the cones, rods play what role in vision?
A: Virtually no role at all.

On the other hand, in dim light, the cones are understimulated leaving only the signal from the what?
A: The rods, resulting in a colorless response. (Furthermore, the rods are barely sensitive to light in the "red" range.)

If one or more types of a person's color-sensing cones are missing or less responsive than normal to incoming light, that person can distinguish fewer colors and is said to be what?
A: Color deficient or color blind.

Almost all color deficient individuals can distinguish what?
A: At least some colors.

While most humans are trichromatic (having three types of color receptors), many animals, known as tetrachromats, have how many?
A: Four types.

These include some species of spiders, most marsupials, birds, reptiles, and many species of what?
A: Fish.

Other species are sensitive to only two axes of color or do not perceive color at all; these are called what?
A: Dichromats and monochromats respectively.

After exposure to strong light in their sensitivity range, photoreceptors of a given type become what?
A: Desensitized.

For a few seconds after the light ceases, they will continue to do what?
A: Signal less strongly than they otherwise would.

Colors observed during that period will appear to lack the color component detected by what?
A: The desensitized photoreceptors.

This effect is responsible for the phenomenon of what?
A: Afterimages, in which the eye may continue to see a bright figure after looking away from it, but in a complementary color.

Afterimage effects have also been utilized by whom?
A: Artists, including Vincent van Gogh.

If a scene is illuminated with one light, and then with another, as long as the difference between the light sources stays within a reasonable range, the colors in the scene appear how?
A: Relatively constant to us.

This was studied by whom?
A: Edwin Land in the 1970s and led to his retinex theory of color constancy.

Colors vary in several different ways, including hue (shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet), saturation, brightness, and what?
A: Gloss.

Some color words are derived from the name of an object of that color, such as "orange" or "salmon", while others are what?
A: Abstract, like "red".

All languages with six "basic" colors include what?
A: Black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow.

Individual colors have a variety of cultural associations such as what?
A: National colors (in general described in individual color articles and color symbolism).

The field of color psychology attempts to identify the effects of color on what?
A: Human emotion and activity.

Chromotherapy is a form of alternative medicine attributed to what?
A: Various Eastern traditions.

Colors have different associations in different what?
A: Countries and cultures.

Different colors have been demonstrated to have effects on what?
A: Cognition.

For example, researchers at the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated that the color red significantly decreases what?
A: Cognitive functioning in men.

A useful concept in understanding the perceived color of a non-monochromatic light source is the what?
A: The dominant wavelength, which identifies the single wavelength of light that produces a sensation most similar to the light source.

Dominant wavelength is roughly akin to what?
A: Hue.

Two different light spectra that have the same effect on the three color receptors in the human eye will be perceived as what?
A: The same color.

The white light emitted by fluorescent lamps, typically has a spectrum of a few narrow bands, while daylight has what?
A: A continuous spectrum.

Similarly, most human color perceptions can be generated by a mixture of three colors called what?
A: Primaries.

This is used to reproduce color scenes in what?
A: Photography, printing, television, and other media.

The range of colors that can be reproduced with a given color reproduction system is called what?
A: The gamut.

The characteristics of the color sensors in electronic devices are often very far from the characteristics of the receptors in what?
A: The human eye.

In effect, acquisition of colors can be relatively poor if they have special, often very "jagged", spectra caused for example by what?
A: Unusual lighting of the photographed scene.

A color reproduction system "tuned" to a human with normal color vision may give very inaccurate results for whom?
A: Other observers.

The color that a surface displays comes from the parts of the visible spectrum that are not what?
A: Absorbed and therefore remain visible.

Without pigments or dye, fabric fibers, paint base and paper are usually made of particles that do what?
A: Scatter white light (all colors) well in all directions.

When a pigment or ink is added, wavelengths are absorbed or "subtracted" from white light, so what happens?
A: Light of another color reaches the eye.

Red paint, viewed under blue light, may appear what?
A: Black.

Red paint is red because it scatters only what?
A: The red components of the spectrum.

If red paint is illuminated by blue light, it will be absorbed by the red paint, creating the appearance of a what?
A: A black object.

What is dichromatism?
A: A phenomenon where the hue is dependent on concentration and thickness of the absorbing substance.