Gold
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97 free Gold trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
50 free gold trivia questions with answers. Think you're a gold expert? Challenge yourself with our comprehensive 97-question trivia quiz covering everything from gold's historical significance to modern mining practices. Whether you're interested in economics, geology, or world history, this quiz will test your knowledge of the precious metal that has captivated civilizations for thousands of years.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the chemical symbol for gold on the periodic table?
Au
Au is short for aurum, the Latin word for gold, which is why the symbol shares no letter with the English name; Ag is silver, Fe iron and Cu copper.
Q 02Gold's atomic number, 79, counts which particles in its nucleus?
Protons
Protons: every gold atom has exactly 79, and since no chemical reaction can change that count, the alchemists' furnaces and acids could never turn lead, with its 82, into gold.
Q 03Alchemists hunted for which legendary substance, said to turn lead and other base metals into gold?
The philosopher's stone
The philosopher's stone was taken so seriously that in 1404 England made 'multiplying' gold a felony; the ban lasted almost three centuries, until chemist Robert Boyle got it repealed.
Q 04Which physical property makes gold easy to hammer into extremely thin sheets, like gold leaf?
Malleability
Malleability lets goldbeaters hammer gold into leaf about a ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick, so a small amount of metal can gild a whole statue or dome.
Q 05Which pharaoh's funerary mask, uncovered in 1925, contains more than 10 kg of gold?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun's mask weighs 10.23 kg; in 2014 museum staff knocked off its plaited beard and hastily stuck it back with epoxy, and it took a German–Egyptian team to repair it properly.
Q 06Roughly how much would a one-litre carton of pure gold weigh?
About 19 kg
About 19 kg: gold is 19.3 times as dense as water, so a carton that holds one kilogram of milk would weigh about as much as a packed suitcase.
Q 07Which physicist's team fired alpha particles at thin gold foil and discovered the atomic nucleus?
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford's assistants saw a few particles bounce straight back off the gold; he said it was as if a 15-inch shell had rebounded from tissue paper, and deduced a tiny, dense nucleus.
Q 08In 2017 astronomers first watched gold being forged, in a collision between two of which objects?
Neutron stars
Neutron stars: their 2017 collision, caught first by its gravitational waves, glowed with freshly made heavy elements, evidence that such smash-ups forge much of the universe's gold.
Q 09Which Black Hills gold-rush town of 1876 is where Wild Bill Hickok was shot at a poker table?
Deadwood
Deadwood sprang up in 1876 on land that still belonged to Native Americans, after gold was found in its gulch; Hickok is said to have been holding aces and eights, now the 'dead man's hand'.
Q 10Pure gold is about as hard as which of these?
Fingernail
Fingernail: it rates about 2.5 on the Mohs hardness scale and pure gold 2.5 to 3; that softness is why goldsmiths alloy it with other metals before making rings.
Q 11Close to half of all the gold ever mined exists today in which form?
Jewelry
Jewelry holds about 45% of all the gold ever mined; gold is virtually indestructible and almost never thrown away, so old pieces are melted down and reused rather than lost.
Q 12Amritsar's Golden Temple, its sanctum sheathed in gold leaf, is the holiest shrine of which religion?
Sikhism
Sikhism's holiest shrine stood for more than two centuries before it became 'golden': Maharaja Ranjit Singh had its sanctum overlaid with gold leaf in 1830.
Q 13What term describes gold's ability to be drawn into extremely fine wires?
Ductility
Ductility is why gold can be spun into thread for embroidery. Its softness is also why jewelry gold is nearly always alloyed with harder metals.
Q 21Which set of 1971 US measures ended the dollar's convertibility into gold?
The Nixon shock
The Nixon shock of August 1971 suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold, and with it the Bretton Woods system; by 1973 the major currencies were floating freely against one another.
Q 22Which process is the gold industry's most widely used way to dissolve gold out of low-grade ore?
Cyanidation
Cyanidation, also called the MacArthur–Forrest process, treats crushed ore with a cyanide solution; the chemical is so toxic that some jurisdictions have banned the method.
Q 23Which metal outdoes gold, and every other metal, at conducting electricity?
Silver
Q 14Injections of gold salts were for decades a standard treatment for which disease?
Rheumatoid arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis was treated with injected gold compounds from the 1930s because they calm inflammation; newer drugs with fewer side effects have largely replaced them since the 1980s.
Q 15In classical alchemy, gold was linked with which heavenly body?
The Sun
The Sun ruled gold in a scheme that gave each of the seven known metals a heavenly body; Saturn's metal was lead, which is why lead poisoning is still called saturnism.
Q 16Which country was the world's largest gold producer in 2024?
China
China overtook South Africa in 2007 to become the world's largest gold producer and has stayed on top since; South Africa had led for more than a century.
Q 17Which gold rush, set off by a find in January 1848, drew some 300,000 people to the American West?
California
California was still Mexican territory on paper when the gold turned up, nine days before the treaty that handed it to the United States; about half of the 300,000 newcomers came by sea.
Q 18Which corrosive liquid is famous for dissolving gold?
Aqua regia
Aqua regia, Latin for 'royal water', got its name because it dissolves gold, the royal metal, which neither of its two ingredients, nitric and hydrochloric acid, can do alone.
Q 19What is the name for a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver?
Electrum
Electrum takes its name from elektron, the Greek word for amber as well as for the pale-gold alloy; the same word later gave English 'electricity', since rubbed amber attracts light objects.
Q 20Gold's world price is quoted per which unit of weight, equal to about 31.1 grams?
Troy ounce
Troy ounce: it is about 10% heavier than the everyday ounce of 28.35 g, part of an old system of weights that survives today only for precious metals.
Silver conducts so well that when copper ran short in World War II, the Manhattan Project borrowed over 13,000 tons of it from the US Treasury to wind its uranium-enriching magnets.
Q 24Where did Cornish miners dig up the 'Welcome Stranger', the largest gold nugget on record?
Australia
Australia: the nugget was found just below the surface at Moliagul, Victoria, in 1869; no local scales could take it, so a blacksmith broke it into three pieces on an anvil.
Q 25If all the gold ever mined were melted into a single cube, roughly how long would each side be?
About 22 metres
About 22 metres: gold is so dense that the roughly 220,000 tonnes mined in all of history would fit inside a single cube, and about two-thirds of it has come out of the ground since 1950.
Q 26The doubloon of pirate lore was a gold coin of which empire?
Spanish
Spanish mints on both sides of the Atlantic struck the doubloon; its name goes back to the Latin for 'double', fitting a coin worth two escudos.
Q 27Adding which metal to gold produces the distinctive 18-karat rose gold?
Copper
Copper gives rose gold its pink tint, and the more copper in the mix the redder the alloy; nickel or palladium bleach gold toward white instead.
Q 28In what type of natural geological formations is gold often found as nuggets or grains?
Alluvial deposits
Alluvial deposits are the sands and gravels laid down by rivers; gold weathered out of rock upstream collects in them because it is far heavier than the sediment around it.
Q 29Which method separates gold from stream gravel by swirling it with water?
Panning
Panning works because gold's high density lets it settle to the bottom while lighter material washes away; it is the simplest way to work a gold-bearing stream.
Q 30Which 14th-century ruler is said to have handed out so much gold in Cairo that its value there fell for years?
Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa of Mali stopped in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca; chroniclers add that he ran short on the way home and had to borrow from the city's merchants at steep interest.