Salt Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz with answers about Salt.

Salt Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is salt?
A: Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts.

Salt in its natural form as a crystalline mineral is known as what?
A: Rock salt or halite.

Salt is present in vast quantities in what?
A: Seawater, where it is the main mineral constituent.

The open ocean has about how many grams of solids per liter of sea water?
A: 35 grams (1.2 oz), a salinity of 3.5%.

Salt is essential for life in general, and saltiness is one of the basic human what?
A: Tastes.

Salt is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous food seasonings, and salting is an important method of what?
A: Food preservation.

Some of the earliest evidence of salt processing dates to around when?
A: 6,000 BC, when people living in the area of present-day Romania boiled spring water to extract salts.

Salt was also prized by what ancient peoples?
A: The Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Hittites, Egyptians, and the Indians.

Salt became an important article of what?
A: Trade and was transported by boat across the Mediterranean Sea, along specially built salt roads, and across the Sahara on camel caravans.

The scarcity and universal need for salt have led nations to go to war over it and use it to raise what?
A: Tax revenues.

Salt is used in what kind of ceremonies?
A: Religious, and has other cultural and traditional significance.

Salt is processed from where?
A: Salt mines, and by the evaporation of seawater (sea salt) and mineral-rich spring water in shallow pools.

Its major industrial products are what?
A: Caustic soda and chlorine.

Of the annual global production of around two hundred million tonnes of salt, about how much is used for human consumption?
A: 6%.

Edible salt is sold in forms such as sea salt and table salt which usually contains what?
A: An anti-caking agent and may be iodized to prevent iodine deficiency.

Sodium is an essential nutrient for human health via its role as a what?
A: An electrolyte and osmotic solute.

Excessive salt consumption may increase the risk of what?
A: Cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, in children and adults.

Accordingly, numerous world health associations and experts in developed countries recommend doing what?
A: Reducing consumption of popular salty foods.

The World Health Organization recommends that adults should consume less than how much sodium?
A: 2,000 mg, equivalent to 5 grams of salt per day.

What is now thought to have been the first city in Europe is Solnitsata, in Bulgaria, which was a what?
A: A salt mine, providing the area now known as the Balkans with salt since 5400 BC.

The name Solnitsata means what?
A: "Salt works".

While people have used canning and artificial refrigeration to preserve food for the last hundred years or so, salt has been what?
A: The best-known food preservative, especially for meat, for many thousands of years.

A very ancient salt-works operation has been discovered where?
A: At the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca, Neamț County, Romania.

Evidence indicates that Neolithic people of the Precucuteni Culture were doing what as far back as 6050 BC?
A: Boiling the salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage to extract the salt.

The salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to what?
A: The rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began.

The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, China, dates back how far?
A: To at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks.

There is more salt in animal tissues, such as meat, blood, and milk, than in what?
A: Plant tissues.

Nomads who subsist on their flocks and herds do not do what?
A: Eat salt with their food.

Vegetarians feeding mainly on cereals and vegetable matter, need to do what?
A: Supplement their diet with salt.

With the spread of civilization, salt became one of the world's what?
A: Main trading commodities.

In the Middle East, salt was used to do what?
A: To ceremonially seal an agreement.

The ancient Hebrews made a "covenant of salt" with God and sprinkled salt on their offerings to show what?
A: Their trust in Him.

An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth, which was what?
A: Scattering salt around in a defeated city to prevent plant growth.

Salt may have been used for barter in connection with what?
A: The obsidian trade in Anatolia in the Neolithic Era.

Where was salt included among funeral offerings found?
A: In ancient Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds, and salt fish.

From about 2800 BC, the Egyptians began exporting salt fish to whom?
A: The Phoenicians in return for Lebanon cedar, glass, and the dye Tyrian purple.

The Phoenicians traded Egyptian salted fish and salt from North Africa throughout what?
A: Their Mediterranean trade empire.

When did Herodotus describe salt trading routes across Libya?
A: Back in the 5th century BC.

In the early years of the Roman Empire, roads were built for what?
A: The transportation of salt from the salt imported at Ostia to the capital.

In Africa, salt was used as what?
A: Currency south of the Sahara.

Where were slabs of rock salt used as coins?
A: In Abyssinia.

In Gabon, before the arrival of Europeans, the coast people carried on what?
A: A remunerative trade with those of the interior by the medium of sea salt.

This was gradually displaced by the salt that Europeans brought in sacks, so that the coast natives lost what?
A: Their previous profits; as of the author's writing in 1958, sea salt was still the currency best appreciated in the interior.

Salzburg, Hallstatt, and Hallein lie within 17 km (11 mi) of each other on the river Salzach in central Austria in an area with what?
A: Extensive salt deposits.

Salzach literally means what?
A: "Salt river" and Salzburg "salt castle", both taking their names from the German word Salz meaning salt and Hallstatt was the site of the world's first salt mine.

The town gave its name to the Hallstatt culture that began mining for salt in the area when?
A: In about 800 BC.

Around 400 BC, the townsfolk, who had previously used pickaxes and shovels, began what?
A: Open pan salt making.

During the first millennium BC, Celtic communities grew rich trading salt and salted meat to whom?
A: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome in exchange for wine and other luxuries.

The word salary comes from what?
A: The Latin word for salt.

The word salad literally means what?
A: "Salted", and comes from the ancient Roman practice of salting leaf vegetables.

Venice fought and won a war with whom over the product?
A: Genoa.

Salt played an important part in the American what?
A: Revolution.

Cities on overland trade routes grew rich by doing what?
A: Levying duties and towns like Liverpool flourished on the export of salt extracted from the salt mines of Cheshire.

Various governments have at different times imposed what?
A: Salt taxes on their peoples.

The voyages of Christopher Columbus are said to have been financed from what?
A: Salt production in southern Spain.

The oppressive salt tax in France was one of the causes of what?
A: The French Revolution.

After being repealed, this tax was re-imposed by Napoleon when he became emperor to pay for what?
A: His foreign wars, and was not finally abolished until 1945.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led at least 100,000 people on the what?
A: The "Dandi March" or "Salt Satyagraha", in which protesters made their own salt from the sea thus defying British rule and avoiding paying the salt tax.