Gold Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz with answers about the element gold.

Gold Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is Gold?
A: Gold is a chemical element with symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79, making it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally.

In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile what?
A: Metal.

Chemically, gold is what kind of metal?
A: A transition metal and a group 11 element.

Gold often occurs in free elemental (native) form, as what?
A: Nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins, and in alluvial deposits.

It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with what?
A: Copper and palladium.

Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold what?
A: Compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).

Gold is resistant to most what?
A: Acids, though it does dissolve in aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid.

Gold is insoluble in nitric acid, which dissolves silver and base metals, a property that has long been used to do what?
A: Refine gold and to confirm the presence of gold in metallic objects.

This gave the rise to what term?
A: The term acid test.

Gold also dissolves in alkaline solutions of cyanide, which are used in what?
A: Mining and electroplating.

Gold dissolves in mercury, forming amalgam alloys, but this is not what?
A: A chemical reaction.

How much gold exists above ground, as of 2015?
A: A total of 186,700 tons.

Gold's high malleability, ductility, resistance to corrosion and most other chemical reactions, and conductivity of electricity have led to its continued use in corrosion resistant what?
A: Electrical connectors in all types of computerized devices (its chief industrial use).

Gold is also used in what type of glass production?
A: Colored.

Certain gold salts are still used as what in medicine?
A: Anti-inflammatory.

As of 2016, the world's largest gold producer by far was what country?
A: China with 450 tons per year.

Gold is the most malleable of all what?
A: Metals.

A single gram can be beaten into a sheet of what size?
A: 1 square meter.

Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become what?
A: Semi-transparent.

Why does the transmitted light appear greenish blue?
A: Because gold strongly reflects yellow and red.

Such semi-transparent sheets also strongly reflect what type of light?
A: Infrared light.

This makes gold useful as infrared (radiant heat) shields in what?
A: Visors of heat-resistant suits, and in sun-visors for spacesuits.

Gold is a good conductor of heat and what?
A: Electricity.

Gold has a density of 19.3 g/cm3, almost identical to that of what?
A: Tungsten at 19.25 g/cm3.

Tungsten has been used in counterfeiting of what?
A: Gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold, or taking an existing gold bar, drilling holes, and replacing the removed gold with tungsten rods.

By comparison, the density of lead is what?
A: 11.34 g/cm3, and that of the densest element, osmium, is 22.588±0.015 g/cm3.

Whereas most metals are gray or silvery white, gold is what?
A: Slightly reddish-yellow.

This color is determined by the frequency of plasma oscillations among the metal's what?
A: Valence electrons, in the ultraviolet range for most metals but in the visible range for gold due to relativistic effects affecting the orbitals around gold atoms.

Common colored gold alloys include the distinctive eighteen-karat rose gold created by the addition of what?
A: Copper.

Alloys containing palladium or nickel are also important in commercial jewelry as these produce what?
A: White gold alloys.

Fourteen-karat gold-copper alloy is nearly identical in color to certain bronze alloys, and both may be used to produce what?
A: Police and other badges.

White gold alloys can be made with what other metals?
A: Palladium or nickel.

Fourteen- and eighteen-karat gold alloys with silver alone appear what?
A: Greenish-yellow and are referred to as green gold.

Blue gold can be made by alloying with what?
A: Iron.

How can purple gold be made?
A: By alloying with aluminum.

Colloidal gold, used by electron-microscopists, is red if the particles are small; larger particles of colloidal gold are what color?
A: Blue.

Gold has how many stable isotopes?
A: Only one, 197.

The production of gold from a more common element, such as lead, has long been a what?
A: A subject of human inquiry, and the ancient and medieval discipline of alchemy often focused on it.

The transmutation of the chemical elements did not become possible until the understanding of what in the 20th century?
A: Nuclear physics.

The first synthesis of gold was conducted by whom?
A: Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka, who synthesized gold from mercury in 1924 by neutron bombardment.

An American team, working without knowledge of Nagaoka's prior study, conducted the same experiment in 1941, achieving the same result and showing what?
A: That the isotopes of gold produced by it were all radioactive.

Gold can currently be manufactured in a nuclear reactor by irradiation of what?
A: Either of platinum or mercury.

Gold does not react with oxygen at any temperature and, up to 100 °C, is resistant to attack from what?
A: Ozone.

Gold is unaffected by what?
A: Most acids.

Gold is similarly unaffected by most what?
A: Bases.

Medicinal applications of gold and its complexes have a long history dating back how far?
A: Thousands of years.

Several gold complexes have been applied to treat what?
A: Rheumatoid arthritis.

Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, and from the collision of what?
A: Neutron stars, and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed.

Because the Earth was molten when it was formed, almost all of the gold present in the early Earth probably did what?
A: Sank into the planetary core.

Therefore, most of the gold that is in the Earth's crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by what?
A: Asteroid impacts during the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.

In August 2017, the signatures of heavy elements, including gold, were observed by what?
A: Gravitational wave detectors and other electromagnetic observatories in the GW170817 neutron star merger event.

Current astrophysical models suggest that single neutron star merger event generated how much gold?
A: Between 3 and 13 Earth masses of gold.

The asteroid that formed Vredefort crater 2.020 billion years ago is often credited with seeding the Witwatersrand basin in South Africa with what?
A: The richest gold deposits on earth.

Native gold occurs as very small to microscopic particles embedded in rock, often together with quartz or sulfide minerals such as what?
A: "Fool's Gold", which is a pyrite.

These are called what?
A: Lode deposits.

The metal in a native state is also found in the form of what?
A: Free flakes, grains or larger nuggets that have been eroded from rocks and end up in alluvial deposits called placer deposits.

The world's “what” contain gold?
A: Oceans.

At 10 parts per quadrillion the Earth's oceans would hold how much gold?
A: 15,000 tons of gold.

The oldest known map of a gold mine was drawn in the 19th Dynasty of what?
A: Ancient Egypt (1320–1200 BC), whereas the first written reference to gold was recorded in the 12th Dynasty around 1900 BC.

Egyptian hieroglyphs from as early as 2600 BC describe gold, which King Tushratta of the Mitanni claimed was what?
A: "More plentiful than dirt" in Egypt.