Silver Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about silver.

Silver Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is silver?
A: Silver is a chemical element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47.

A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest what of any metal?
A: Electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity.

The metal is found in the Earth's crust in the pure, free elemental form ("native silver"), as an alloy with gold and other metals, and in minerals such as what?
A: Argentite and chlorargyrite.

Most silver is produced as a byproduct of what?
A: Copper, gold, lead, and zinc refining.

Silver has long been valued as a what?
A: A precious metal.

Silver metal is used in many bullion coins, sometimes alongside what?
A: Gold: while it is more abundant than gold, it is much less abundant as a native metal.

As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had an enduring role in most what?
A: Human cultures.

Its compounds are used in photographic and X-ray what?
A: Film.

Dilute solutions of silver nitrate and other silver compounds are used as what?
A: Disinfectants and microbiocides (oligodynamic effect), added to bandages and wound-dressings, catheters, and other medical instruments.

Silver is extremely ductile, and can be drawn into a wire how wide?
A: One atom wide.

Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to what two vertical neighbors in group 11 of the periodic table?
A: Copper and gold.

Silver has a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a high what?
A: Polish, and which is so characteristic that the name of the metal itself has become a color name.

Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminum at what wavelengths?
A: All wavelengths longer than ~450 nm.

At wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silver's reflectivity is inferior to that of what?
A: Aluminum and drops to zero near 310 nm.

The electrical conductivity of silver is the greatest of all metals, greater even than copper, but it is not widely used for this property because of what?
A: The higher cost.

An exception is in radio-frequency engineering, particularly at VHF and higher frequencies where silver plating improves electrical conductivity because those currents tend to flow on what?
A: On the surface of conductors rather than through the interior.

During World War II in the US, how many tons of silver were used in electromagnets for enriching uranium, mainly because of the wartime shortage of copper?
A: 13,540.

Silver readily forms alloys with what metals?
A: Copper and gold, as well as zinc.

Silver does not react with air, even at what?
A: Red heat, and thus was considered by alchemists as a noble metal along with gold.

Like copper, silver reacts with sulfur and its compounds; in their presence, silver tarnishes in air to form what?
A: Black silver sulfide (copper forms the green sulfate instead, while gold does not react).

Unlike copper, silver will not react with what?
A: The halogens, with the exception of fluorine gas, with which it forms the difluoride.

While silver is not attacked by non-oxidizing acids, the metal dissolves readily in what?
A: Hot concentrated sulfuric acid, as well as dilute or concentrated nitric acid.

In the presence of air, and especially in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, silver dissolves readily in what?
A: Aqueous solutions of cyanide.

The three main forms of deterioration in historical silver artifacts are what?
A: Tarnishing, formation of silver chloride due to long-term immersion in salt water, as well as reaction with nitrate ions or oxygen.

The precipitation of copper in ancient silver can be used to do what?
A: To date artifacts, as copper is nearly always a constituent of silver alloys.

Silver cyanide solutions are used in what?
A: Electroplating of silver.

Silver was one of the seven metals of antiquity that were known to prehistoric humans and whose discovery is thus what?
A: Lost to history.

In particular, the three metals of group 11, copper, silver, and gold, occur in the elemental form in nature and were probably used as the first primitive forms of what?
A: Money as opposed to simple bartering.

However, unlike copper, silver did not lead to the growth of metallurgy on account of its what?
A: Low structural strength, and was more often used ornamentally or as money.

Silver was more expensive than gold in Egypt until around when?
A: The fifteenth century BC: the Egyptians are thought to have separated gold from silver by heating the metals with salt, and then reducing the silver chloride produced to the metal.

The situation changed with the discovery of what?
A: Cupellation, a technique that allowed silver metal to be extracted from its ores.

Slag heaps found in Asia Minor and on the islands of the Aegean Sea indicate that silver was being separated from lead as early as when?
A: The 4th millennium BC.

What was one of the earliest silver extraction centers in Europe?
A: Sardinia in the early Chalcolithic period.

The origins of silver production in India, China, and Japan were almost certainly equally ancient, but are not well-documented due to their what?
A: Their great age.

When the Phoenicians first came to what is now Spain, they obtained so much silver that they could not fit it all on their ships, and as a result did what?
A: They used silver to weight their anchors instead of lead.

The rise of Athens was partly made possible by what?
A: The nearby silver mines at Laurium, from which they extracted about 30 tons a year from 600 to 300 BC.

The stability of the Roman currency relied to a high degree on the supply of what?
A: Silver bullion, mostly from Spain, which Roman miners produced on a scale unparalleled before the discovery of the New World.

Reaching a peak production of 200 tons per year, an estimated silver stock of how many tons circulated in the Roman economy in the middle of the second century AD?
A: 10,000.

This production came to a nearly complete halt with the fall of the Roman Empire, not to resume until when?
A: The time of Charlemagne: by then, tens of thousands of tons of silver had already been extracted.

What region became the centre of silver production during the Middle Ages?
A: Central Europe.

Why?
A: The Mediterranean deposits exploited by the ancient civilizations had been exhausted.

In the Americas, high temperature silver-lead cupellation technology was developed by pre-Inca civilizations as early as when?
A: AD 60–120.

With the discovery of America and the plundering of silver by the Spanish conquistadors, Central and South America became what?
A: The dominant producers of silver until around the beginning of the 18th century, particularly Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.

Still, much of it went to Spain, allowing Spanish rulers to pursue what?
A: Military and political ambitions in both Europe and the Americas.

In the 19th century, primary production of silver moved to where?
A: North America, particularly Canada, Mexico, and Nevada in the United States.

Poland emerged as an important producer during the 1970s after the discovery of what?
A: Copper deposits that were rich in silver, before the centre of production returned to the Americas the following decade.

Today, Peru and Mexico are still among the primary silver producers, but the distribution of silver production around the world is what?
A: Quite balanced and about one-fifth of the silver supply comes from recycling instead of new production.