Rubber Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about rubber!

Rubber Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is rubber?
A: Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds, plus water.

Thailand and Indonesia are two of the leading what?
A: Rubber producers.

Forms of polyisoprene that are used as natural rubbers are classified as what?
A: Elastomers.

Currently, rubber is harvested mainly in the form of what?
A: The latex from the rubber tree or others.

What is latex?
A: Latex is a sticky, milky colloid drawn off by making incisions in the bark and collecting the fluid in vessels in a process called "tapping".

The latex then is refined into what?
A: Rubber ready for commercial processing.

In major areas, latex is allowed to coagulate where?
A: In the collection cup.

In most of its useful forms, it has a large stretch ratio and high resilience, and is extremely what?
A: Waterproof.

What is the major commercial source of natural rubber latex?
A: The Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), a member of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae.

This species is preferred because it does what?
A: It grows well under cultivation.

A properly managed tree responds to wounding by doing what?
A: Producing more latex for several years.

Dandelion milk contains what?
A: Latex.

The latex exhibits the same quality as what?
A: The natural rubber from rubber trees.

In the wild types of dandelion, latex content is what?
A: Low and varies greatly.

In Hitler’s Germany, research projects tried to use dandelions as a base for rubber production, but what?
A: They failed.

In 2013, by inhibiting one key enzyme and using modern cultivation methods and optimization techniques, scientists in the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Germany developed what?
A: A cultivar that is suitable for commercial production of natural rubber.

In collaboration with Continental Tires, IME began a what?
A: A pilot facility.

Many other plants produce forms of latex rich in what?
A: Isoprene polymers, though not all produce usable forms of polymer as easily as the Pará.

Some of them require more elaborate what?
A: Processing to produce anything like usable rubber and most are more difficult to tap.

The term gum rubber is sometimes applied to the tree-obtained version of natural rubber in order to what?
A: Distinguish it from the synthetic version.

The first use of rubber was by whom?
A: The indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica.

The earliest archeological evidence of the use of natural latex from the Hevea tree comes from the Olmec culture, in which rubber was first used for what?
A: Making balls for the Mesoamerican ballgame.

Rubber was later used by what cultures?
A: Maya and Aztec cultures.

In addition to making balls Aztecs used rubber for other purposes such as what?
A: Making containers and to make textiles waterproof by impregnating them with the latex sap.

The Pará rubber tree is indigenous to where?
A: South America.

Who is credited with introducing samples of rubber to the Académie Royale des Sciences of France in 1736?
A: Charles Marie de La Condamine.

In 1751, he presented a paper by François Fresneau to the Académie (published in 1755) that described what?
A: Many of rubber's properties.

This has been referred to as the first what?
A: Scientific paper on rubber.

In England, Joseph Priestley, in 1770, observed what?
A: That a piece of the material was extremely good for rubbing off pencil marks on paper, hence the name "rubber".

In 1764 François Fresnau discovered that turpentine was a what?
A: A rubber solvent.

Giovanni Fabbroni is credited with the discovery of “what”, as a rubber solvent in 1779?
A: Naphtha.

What area remained the main source of latex rubber used during much of the 19th century?
A: South America.

The rubber trade was heavily controlled by business interests but no laws expressly prohibited what?
A: The export of seeds or plants.

In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Pará rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to where?
A: Kew Gardens, England.

Of the 70,000 seeds, how many of these germinated?
A: Only 2,400.

Seedlings were then sent to where?
A: India, British Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Singapore, and British Malaya.

Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) was later to become what?
A: The biggest producer of rubber.

In the early 1900s, the Congo Free State in Africa was also a significant source of natural rubber latex, mostly gathered by what?
A: Forced labor.

King Leopold II's colonial state brutally enforced what?
A: Production quotas.

Tactics to enforce the rubber quotas included removing what?
A: The hands of victims to prove they had been killed.

Soldiers often came back from raids with baskets full of what?
A: Chopped-off hands.

Villages that resisted were razed to encourage what?
A: Better compliance locally.

In India, commercial cultivation was introduced by whom?
A: British planters.

Experimental efforts to grow rubber on a commercial scale were initiated as early as 1873 at the what?
A: Calcutta Botanical Gardens.

India today is the world's 3rd largest producer and 4th largest what?
A: Consumer.

In Singapore and Malaya, commercial production was heavily promoted by whom?
A: Sir Henry Nicholas Ridley, who served as the first Scientific Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1888 to 1911.

He distributed rubber seeds to many planters and developed the first technique for doing what?
A: Tapping trees for latex without causing serious harm to the tree.

Because of his fervent promotion of this crop, he is popularly remembered by what nickname?
A: The nickname "Mad Ridley".

Who developed vulcanization in 1839?
A: Charles Goodyear.

Before World War II significant uses included what?
A: Door and window profiles, hoses, belts, gaskets, matting, flooring and dampeners (antivibration mounts) for the automotive industry.

The use of rubber in “what”, consumed a significant amount of rubber?
A: Car tires (initially solid rather than pneumatic)

Gloves (medical, household and industrial) and toy balloons were what?
A: Large consumers of rubber, although the type of rubber used is concentrated latex.

Rubber was commonly used to make what common items?
A: Rubber bands and pencil erasers.

Rubber produced as a fiber, sometimes called 'elastic', had significant value to what industry?
A: The textile industry because of its excellent elongation and recovery properties.

For these purposes, manufactured rubber fiber was made as either an extruded round fiber or what?
A: Rectangular fibers cut into strips from extruded film.

Because of its low dye acceptance, feel and appearance, the rubber fiber was what?
A: It was either covered by yarn of another fiber or directly woven with other yarns into the fabric.

Rubber yarns were used in what?
A: Foundation garments.

While rubber is still used in textile manufacturing, its low tenacity limits its use in what?
A: Lightweight garments because latex lacks resistance to oxidizing agents and is damaged by aging, sunlight, oil and perspiration.

Rubber begins to melt at approximately what temperature?
A: 180 °C (356 °F).

On a microscopic scale, relaxed rubber is a disorganized cluster of what?
A: Erratically changing wrinkled chains.

In stretched rubber, the chains are almost what?
A: Linear.

The restoring force is due to the preponderance of what?
A: Wrinkled conformations over more linear ones.

Raw rubber storage depots and rubber processing can produce malodor that is serious enough to become what?
A: A source of complaints and protest to those living in the vicinity.

Once the rubber is vulcanized, it is a what?
A: A thermoset.

The final properties of a rubber item depend not just on the polymer, but also on modifiers and fillers, such as what?
A: Carbon black, factice, whiting and others.