Alkaline Earth Metals
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40 free Alkaline Earth Metals trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The alkaline earth metals are six elements that sit side by side in the periodic table: beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium and radium. They are too reactive to be found on their own in nature, yet their compounds are everywhere, in cliffs and caves, in fireworks, in medicine cabinets and in space telescopes. This quiz collects the fun facts people most often look up about the family. It covers where each element got its name, who first isolated them, what colours they burn, what they do inside plants and the human body, and the strange and sometimes tragic history of radium. It is pitched for curious readers, students revising the periodic table and quiz setters looking for science questions. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish with a handful of facts worth repeating.
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Q 01Which precious gemstone is a variety of beryl, the mineral that gave beryllium its name?
Emerald
Emerald is beryl tinted by traces of chromium or vanadium. Pure beryl, the mineral beryllium is extracted from, has no colour at all.
Q 02The Radium Girls were factory workers poisoned by the glowing paint they applied to which products?
Watch dials
Watch dials needed such fine brushwork that the women were told to point the bristles with their lips, swallowing a little radium with every stroke.
Q 03Magnesium sulfate, a popular bath soak, is sold as a salt named after which English spa town?
Epsom
Epsom, in Surrey, had a spring on its common that drew 17th-century visitors seeking cures. The bitter salt left behind when the water was boiled took the town's name.
Q 04The James Webb Space Telescope's beryllium mirrors are coated in a thin film of which metal?
Gold
Gold reflects infrared light superbly. Beryllium sits beneath it because the metal is light, exceptionally stiff and keeps its shape in the extreme cold of deep space.
Q 05Marie Curie's radium-contaminated papers are stored in boxes lined with which metal?
Lead
Lead blocks the radiation, and anyone who wants to consult the papers must wear protective clothing. Even her cookbooks are radioactive.
Q 06Which molecule, used by plants to capture sunlight, holds a single magnesium atom at its centre?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll holds magnesium where the haem in blood holds iron. Finding the metal there in 1906 was the first time magnesium had been detected in living tissue.
Q 07Beryllium was once called glucinium because some of its compounds have which taste?
Sweet
Sweet was the verdict of early chemists, who identified beryllium compounds by tasting them. It was a hazardous habit, because the element is highly toxic.
Q 08Barium compounds are packed into fireworks to produce which colour when the shells burst?
Green
Green is barium's signature in a flame, so reliable that chemists use the colour as a quick check for the element in an unknown sample.
Q 09Patients swallow a barium sulfate drink so their digestive tract shows up on which type of scan?
X-ray
X-ray beams are strongly absorbed by barium. The drink is safe because barium sulfate barely dissolves, so the toxic metal passes through without being taken up.
Q 10Strontium is named after Strontian, a village where its mineral was first found, in which country?
Scotland
Scotland's Strontian lies in the western Highlands, where 18th-century miners turned up an unfamiliar mineral that was named strontianite after the village.
Q 11The alkaline earth metals occupy which column of the periodic table, right beside the alkali metals?
Group 2
Group 2 atoms each carry a pair of outer electrons that they give up readily, which is why these metals are reactive and always form ions with a double positive charge.
Q 12Which English chemist first isolated magnesium, calcium, strontium and barium, all during 1808?
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy had already isolated sodium and potassium the year before, so his tally reached six new metals in about two years.
Q 13Which element did the Curies discover months before radium and name after Marie's homeland?
Polonium
Polonium honours Poland, which at the time was partitioned between three empires and did not exist as an independent country. The Curies found it in the same ore as radium.
Q 21What do dissolved calcium and magnesium create at the tap, furring up kettles and resisting soap lather?
Hard water
Hard water picks up both metals as it seeps through rock, which is why soap refuses to foam in it and softeners are sold to strip them out again.
Q 22Which flammable gas, burned in old miners' lamps, is made by dripping water onto calcium carbide?
Acetylene
Acetylene lamps were worn on miners' hats in the early twentieth century, and also served as lighthouse beacons and as headlights on early motor cars and bicycles.
Q 23Gypsum, a calcium sulfate mineral, is heated to make which powder used for casts on broken limbs?
Plaster of Paris
Q 14Almost all of the calcium in the human body, roughly 99 percent, is stored in which tissues?
Bones and teeth
Bones and teeth get their structure and strength from it, while the tiny remainder helps nerves carry messages around the body.
Q 15Which nutrient, made in skin exposed to sunlight, does the body need to absorb calcium from food?
Vitamin D
Vitamin D raises the gut's uptake of calcium. It was discovered in 1922 during the search for the dietary cause of rickets in children.
Q 16Which rock, used to clad the Taj Mahal, is mostly recrystallised calcium carbonate?
Marble
Marble forms when heat and pressure deep underground recrystallise carbonate rock. Its famous veins and swirls come from impurities such as clay and iron oxides.
Q 17The White Cliffs of Dover are made of which soft, crumbly form of calcium carbonate?
Chalk
Chalk is built from the microscopic shells of plankton that settled on an ancient sea floor, so the cliffs are essentially a graveyard of tiny sea creatures.
Q 18Radium decays directly into which radioactive gas, once known to scientists as radium emanation?
Radon
Radon is a dense noble gas that can be breathed in, which makes it responsible for much of the danger posed by radium in the environment.
Q 19Magnesium ribbon, which burns with a light like daylight, was first made in the 1860s for which craft?
Photography
Photography gained a bright artificial light from burning magnesium. In 1887 two German inventors turned it into flash powder, set off in a single bright burst.
Q 20Calcium is best known from milk and seashells, but what colour is the pure metal?
Silvery
A silvery metal is the surprise: pure calcium is bright and shiny, but air quickly coats it in a dark layer, and it is far too reactive to occur uncombined in nature.
Plaster of Paris is named after Montmartre, a hill in the north of the French capital, whose quarries long supplied the burnt gypsum.
Q 24Radium was once widely used in hospitals as a source of radiation for treating which disease?
Cancer
Cancer treatment even gave radium a modern revival: the isotope radium-223 was approved in the United States in 2013 for prostate tumours that have spread.
Q 25Marie Curie's discovery and isolation of radium earned her a second Nobel Prize, in which field?
Chemistry
Chemistry made her the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice. Her earlier award, in physics, had been shared with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel.
Q 26Barium takes its name from a Greek word, also the root of baritone, with which meaning?
Heavy
Heavy describes barium's dense ores, one of which is also known as heavy spar.
Q 27Calcium fizzes when dropped into water, leaving an alkaline solution and giving off which gas?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen bubbles off faster further down the family: calcium reacts more quickly than magnesium but less quickly than strontium, while beryllium does not react with cold water at all.
Q 28Strontium salts go into emergency road flares because they burn with which colour of flame?
Red
Red flares for roads and ships are often based on strontium nitrate, and the same family of salts supplies the deep scarlet in firework displays.
Q 29Which mineral, the softest on the Mohs scale and the basis of baby powder, is a magnesium silicate?
Talc
Talc defines the very bottom of the scale, with a value of 1. Ground up, often with corn starch, it becomes the familiar nursery powder.
Q 30Most of the world's baryte, the chief ore of barium, is used to weigh down the muds of which industry?
Oil drilling
Oil drilling and gas wells swallow most of the baryte mined, far ahead of chemicals and paint fillers. The dense powder adds weight to the mud pumped down the hole.