Nitrogen Trivia
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50 free Nitrogen trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nitrogen makes up most of every breath you take, and yet your body cannot use a single molecule of it until lightning, bacteria or a German chemist has broken it apart. This quiz covers element number seven from the air to the fertiliser bag. The easy questions ask what its symbol is, what share of the atmosphere it fills, who first isolated it, how cold liquid nitrogen is and what laughing gas actually is. From there it moves into the chemistry: the triple bond that makes N2 so stubborn, why Lavoisier wanted to call it azote, why the group is called the pnictogens, the two stable isotopes and the radioisotope that lights up nuclear reactor coolant. The harder end is for chemists and history buffs alike: Rutherford's 'noxious air', Chaptal coining nitrogène, Rayleigh's active nitrogen, Haber and Le Rossignol making ammonia drop by drop in 1909, BASF's Oppau plant, the Chilean nitrate fields fought over in the War of the Pacific, guano, Sobrero and Nobel, TNT's life as a yellow dye, Martini's law for divers, the beer widget, airbags, the 2012 liquid-nitrogen cocktail, the first execution by nitrogen and the moon whose sky is thick with the stuff. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the element, its compounds and its history, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our periodic table, oxygen and chemistry quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nitrogen sits between which two elements in the periodic table?
Carbon and oxygen
Carbon and oxygen. Nitrogen, atomic number 7, is the quiet one of the trio: carbon burns and oxygen feeds the fire, while nitrogen gas barely reacts with anything.
Q 02Roughly what percentage of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen?
78%
78%. Yet almost none of it is usable as it stands: plants and animals depend on the small part that soil bacteria have first 'fixed' into compounds.
Q 03What is the name for the group of elements headed by nitrogen?
Pnictogens
Pnictogens. The same column of the periodic table holds nitrogen and phosphorus, which every living cell needs, and arsenic, notorious as a poison.
Q 04Which Scottish physician is credited with discovering nitrogen in 1772?
Daniel Rutherford
Daniel Rutherford. He stripped trapped air of its oxygen and carbon dioxide and found that the gas left over put out flames, yet he never realised he had isolated an element.
Q 05Which nitrogen-rich fertiliser, left for years in a port warehouse, caused the 2020 Beirut explosion?
Ammonium nitrate
Ammonium nitrate. About 2,750 tonnes of it had been taken off a stranded cargo ship and sat in the port for six years before a fire set it off.
Q 06What name did Lavoisier propose for nitrogen, meaning 'no life' in Greek?
Azote
Azote. It is still the French word for nitrogen, though the name proved ironic: the 'lifeless' gas turned out to be built into every protein and every strand of DNA.
Q 07Chaptal named nitrogen after nitre, the gunpowder ingredient better known by which name?
Saltpetre
Saltpetre. Chemists had found the gas locked inside it and in the nitric acid made from it, so in 1790 Chaptal coined 'nitrogène', the nitre-former, and English borrowed the word.
Q 08What does the German name for nitrogen, Stickstoff, refer to?
Choking or suffocating
Choking or suffocating. The name was coined in 1791 from ersticken, 'to suffocate', because the gas smothers flames, yet it isn't poisonous at all: it simply isn't oxygen.
Q 09What kind of bond joins the two atoms in nitrogen gas?
Triple bond
Triple bond. It is so stable that nitrogen compounds release huge energy when they collapse back into the gas, which is why so many explosives are nitrogen compounds.
Q 10Which poisonous gas has the only two-atom bond stronger than the one in nitrogen gas?
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide. The two molecules are near-twins, with the same number of electrons and almost the same boiling point, yet one is harmless to breathe and the other is a deadly poison.
Q 11Liquid nitrogen boils at −196 °C, which is a tidy 77 degrees on which temperature scale?
Kelvin
Kelvin. The 77 K mark mattered in 1987, when superconductors that work above it were found: they could be chilled with cheap liquid nitrogen instead of a far costlier coolant.
Q 12Fertiliser labels list three nutrients as N-P-K: nitrogen, phosphorus and which third element?
Potassium
Potassium. The K stands for kalium, its Latin name, which like the English word goes back to potash: plant ashes once boiled down in pots and spread on fields.
Q 13Short-lived nitrogen-16 in cooling water flags leaks in which kind of plant?
Nuclear power station
Q 21Carl Bosch shared the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for taming which extreme condition?
High pressure
High pressure. His ammonia reactors squeezed the gases inside specially engineered vessels that could take the strain; co-winner Friedrich Bergius used the same kind of pressure to turn coal into liquid fuel.
Q 22Which fast-acting poison is an ion made of one carbon atom and one nitrogen atom?
Cyanide
Cyanide. It kills by stopping the body's cells from using oxygen, yet compounds that release it occur naturally in apple seeds, cherry stones and bitter almonds.
Q 23Which process turns ammonia into nitric acid for fertilisers and explosives?
Ostwald
Ostwald. His process burns ammonia over hot platinum; fed with synthetic ammonia, it kept Germany making explosives through the First World War after the blockade cut off Chilean nitrate.
Nuclear power station. Neutrons in the core turn oxygen in the water into nitrogen-16, whose fierce gamma rays fade in seconds, so a trace in the steam flags a leaking tube at once.
Q 14Short-lived radioactive nitrogen-13 is used in which kind of medical scan?
PET scan
PET scan. With a half-life of only ten minutes, the isotope must be made in the hospital's own cyclotron and injected within minutes, typically to map blood flow through the heart.
Q 15Lord Rayleigh found that nitrogen taken from air was slightly heavier than nitrogen made from chemicals, revealing which hidden gas?
Argon
Argon. The gap was only about half a percent, but Rayleigh and William Ramsay tracked it down, isolating the new gas in 1894, and each won a Nobel Prize for it in 1904.
Q 16Every one of which molecules in the human body contains nitrogen?
Amino acids
Amino acids. Each carries a nitrogen-bearing 'amino' group, named after ammonia, and those groups link them into proteins, which is why nitrogen is the fourth most abundant element in the body.
Q 17The Haber–Bosch process makes ammonia by combining nitrogen from the air with which other gas?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen. Fritz Haber found the conditions and Carl Bosch scaled them up; by 2008 fertiliser made from their ammonia was estimated to feed nearly half the world's people.
Q 18Which cheap metal replaced rare osmium as the catalyst of the Haber–Bosch process?
Iron
Iron. Haber's own catalyst, osmium, was far too scarce for a factory, so Alwin Mittasch searched systematically for a substitute and settled on iron with a few additives.
Q 19Which company's Oppau plant first ran the Haber–Bosch process industrially in 1913?
BASF
BASF. The dye maker bought Haber's benchtop method and set its engineer Carl Bosch to scale it up; within four years the Oppau works was making ammonia by the tonne.
Q 20In 2008, which nitrogen-rich chemical was added to watered-down Chinese milk to fake its protein content?
Melamine
Melamine. Milk tests judge protein by counting nitrogen, and melamine is two-thirds nitrogen by weight, so diluted milk passed; six babies died and about 300,000 fell ill.
Q 24Besides bacteria, which natural force fixes nitrogen from the air for plants?
Lightning
Lightning. The heat of a bolt makes nitrogen and oxygen combine into oxides, though microbes armed with nitrogenase enzymes still do over 90% of nature's fixing.
Q 25Rhizobia bacteria fix nitrogen inside the root nodules of which plant family?
Legumes
Legumes. The plant feeds the bacteria and gets nitrogen in return, which is why farmers rotate peas, beans and clover with hungrier crops to keep the soil fertile.
Q 26What is the main nitrogen-bearing waste the human body makes from protein?
Urea
Urea. The liver makes it to lock away toxic ammonia; most fish simply shed ammonia into the water, while birds and reptiles save water by excreting uric acid instead.
Q 27Alfred Nobel tamed nitroglycerin by soaking it into a fine, absorbent sand to make which explosive?
Dynamite
Dynamite. An explosion at the family works had killed his younger brother Emil and such experiments were banned inside Stockholm, so Nobel moved his work to a barge on a lake.
Q 28What is nitrous oxide better known as?
Laughing gas
Laughing gas. It is no joke for the climate: pound for pound it traps hundreds of times more heat than carbon dioxide, and most of what people emit seeps from fertilised farm soil.
Q 29Which chemist coined the popular nickname for nitrous oxide?
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy. He tested the gas on himself in Bristol in 1799 and wrote that it might ease the pain of surgery, yet nobody tried that for another four decades.
Q 30Which everyday kitchen product is pressurised with nitrous oxide?
Whipped cream canisters
Whipped cream canisters. Sealed in the can, the gas dissolves into the cream's fat, then bubbles back out the moment the nozzle is pressed, puffing the cream into foam.