Ammonia
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40 free Ammonia trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ammonia is one of the most heavily manufactured chemicals on Earth, yet most people know it only as the sharp smell under the kitchen sink. The same small molecule feeds crops, flavours sweets, wakes up dazed athletes and drifts through the clouds of distant worlds. This quiz collects the best ammonia fun facts: how the gas got its name, what it does inside the body, the scientists who learned to make it from thin air, and the strange places it turns up, from old-fashioned remedies and furniture workshops to spacecraft and record sleeves. A few questions cover the basic chemistry, pitched so that no science degree is needed. It suits science fans, students revising the nitrogen cycle and anyone who enjoys a did-you-know fact with a pungent edge. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the surprising part sticks.
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Q 01Ammonia takes its name from which ancient god, near whose desert temple a namesake salt was once gathered?
Amun
Amun was Ammon to the Greeks, and the Roman writer Pliny described a salt named for a nearby temple of his in North Africa; the name later passed to the gas.
Q 02The pale upper clouds of which planet are made of frozen ammonia crystals floating above deeper layers?
Jupiter
Jupiter's bright zones owe their lighter colour to the frozen ammonia, while nobody is yet sure what stains the darker belts that run between them.
Q 03Ancient Roman launderers cleaned cloth by treading it in tubs of which stale, ammonia-rich liquid?
Urine
Urine mattered so much to Rome's cloth trade that it was taxed, because once it goes stale it becomes a cleansing source of ammonium salts.
Q 04Safety labels warn never to mix ammonia with which common household cleaner, because the pair release toxic fumes?
Bleach
Bleach contains hypochlorite, which reacts with ammonia to form irritating chloramine gases and can go on to make an explosive compound, nitrogen trichloride.
Q 05Which ammonia-releasing remedy, once used to revive fainting Victorians, do athletes now reach for before competing?
Smelling salts
Smelling salts give off ammonia gas that triggers a sharp reflex breath, and most boxing competitions now ban them for fear of masking a serious injury.
Q 06Which candy, hugely popular in Finland and the Netherlands, gets its sharp salty bite from ammonium chloride?
Licorice
Licorice flavoured with the salt is known as salmiak, and the Nordic taste for it stretches to salmiak chocolate, chewing gum and vodka.
Q 07Which human organ protects the brain by turning toxic ammonia from protein breakdown into far safer urea?
Liver
Liver cells run the urea cycle, and when the organ fails, as in cirrhosis, ammonia builds up in the blood and can bring on confusion and coma.
Q 08A warehouse of ammonium nitrate exploded in August 2020 at the port of which Mediterranean capital city?
Beirut
Beirut's blast involved about 2,750 tonnes of the chemical, which had sat in a port warehouse for six years after being unloaded from an abandoned cargo ship.
Q 09Hákarl, an Icelandic delicacy notorious for its powerful ammonia smell, is the fermented meat of which animal?
Shark
Shark meat from the Greenland species is poisonous when fresh because it is loaded with urea, so it is fermented and then hung to dry for four to five months.
Q 10Roughly 70 percent of the ammonia made in factories worldwide goes into which kind of product?
Fertilizer
Fertilizer from factory ammonia transformed twentieth-century farming, and pure ammonia is even injected straight into the soil of crop fields.
Q 11Which German chemist won a Nobel Prize for making ammonia from air yet also led Germany's poison gas programme?
Fritz Haber
Fritz Haber's synthesis has been called the detonator of the population explosion, yet he was on hand in person for the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915.
Q 12Each ammonia molecule is one nitrogen atom joined to three atoms of which element, found twice in every water molecule?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen gives ammonia the formula NH3, and its three atoms sit beneath the nitrogen like the legs of a tripod rather than lying flat.
Q 13Which animals turn waste ammonia into a pasty uric acid, the pale part of their droppings, to save water?
Birds
Q 21On the International Space Station, liquid ammonia circulating in loops outside the hull does which job?
Cooling
Cooling is ammonia's task in orbit: the loops carry heat from the electronics to large radiators, and the fluid is kept under enough pressure to stay liquid.
Q 22Ferdinand Carré's ammonia-based machine, shown at London's 1862 exhibition, was built to produce what?
Ice
Ice from Carré's absorption machine launched ammonia's long career in refrigeration, and in 1876 he fitted out a ship to carry frozen meat between continents.
Q 23Which ultra-precise timekeeper was first prototyped in 1949 using the natural vibration of ammonia molecules?
Atomic clock
Atomic clock builders soon switched from ammonia to caesium, the atom whose vibrations now define the length of the second.
Birds share the trick with reptiles: uric acid is a solid, so it leaves the body with minimal water, whereas mammals must flush out urea dissolved in liquid.
Q 14Bacteria in the root nodules of which plant family, including peas and clover, turn nitrogen from the air into ammonia?
Legumes
Legumes shelter rhizobia bacteria, whose nitrogenase enzymes manage at soil temperature what chemical plants need fierce heat and pressure to achieve.
Q 15Ammonia dissolved in water, the pungent cleaner sold in bottles, belongs to which chemical category?
Weak base
Weak base fits because the molecule's lone pair of electrons accepts a proton from water, yet a strong solution still reaches a pH above 11.
Q 16Ammonia gas turns damp red litmus paper which colour, a classic test used in school chemistry labs?
Blue
Blue is the tell-tale result, and the dye that makes the paper change is a mixture extracted from lichens.
Q 17Arts and Crafts furniture makers such as Gustav Stickley darkened which wood by sealing it in ammonia fumes?
Oak
Oak darkens because ammonia reacts with its natural tannins, an effect first noticed in England when boards stored in a stable changed colour.
Q 18Lean beef trimmings treated with ammonia to kill bacteria became notorious under which nickname after 2012 news reports?
Pink slime
Pink slime made with ammonia gas is banned for human consumption in Canada, although American regulators judged the treatment both safe and effective.
Q 19Which rocket plane, flown by Neil Armstrong before his astronaut days, burned liquid ammonia as its fuel?
X-15
X-15 engineers valued ammonia because it left no soot in the reusable engine, and the aircraft went on to cross the edge of outer space.
Q 20Medieval alchemists in the Islamic world collected ammonium chloride from the soot of which animal's burning dung?
Camel
Camel dung soot gave the Islamic world a home-grown supply of the salt, called sal ammoniac, alongside the older sources in Central Asia.
Q 24Which microwave forerunner of the laser was first built in the 1950s using a stream of energised ammonia molecules?
Maser
Maser is short for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, and the invention earned Charles Townes a share of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 25Which eighteenth-century chemist, famed for his work on oxygen, isolated ammonia gas and named it alkaline air?
Priestley
Priestley collected the gas in the 1770s as one of several new airs, and the French chemist Claude Berthollet worked out its exact composition in 1785.
Q 26Ammonia solution was once called spirit of hartshorn because it was distilled from the horn shavings of which animal?
Deer
Deer antlers, hartshorn in older English, were shaved and distilled for the purpose, and a jelly made from them was once prescribed for diarrhoea.
Q 27The fossil ammonite and the chemical ammonia are both named after a god shown with the horns of which animal?
Ram
Ram horns curl in a tight spiral much like the fossil shells, which is why the Roman writer Pliny the Elder named the fossils after the god's horns.
Q 28America's deadliest industrial accident hit which Gulf Coast port in 1947 when a ship's ammonium nitrate cargo exploded?
Texas City
Texas City lost at least 581 people, including all but one member of its volunteer fire department, after a fire broke out aboard the French ship Grandcamp.
Q 29What does the chemical term anhydrous mean in anhydrous ammonia, the form that farmers inject into their fields?
Without water
Without water is the meaning: the label separates the pure gas, stored as a pressurised liquid, from household ammonia, which is only a 5 to 10 percent solution.
Q 30Which BASF engineer scaled ammonia synthesis up to factory size and won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Carl Bosch
Carl Bosch had to design furnaces and compressors that could survive extreme gas pressures, and the first full-scale plant rose at Oppau in Germany.