Phosphorus
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40 free Phosphorus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Phosphorus is the element that glows in the dark, lights a fire at the scrape of a stick, and quietly holds every living thing together. Its discovery is one of the oddest stories in chemistry, and its history runs from secretive alchemists to factory strikes, battlefields and the search for life on other worlds. This quiz turns the best fun facts about phosphorus into questions. Expect the story of how it was first made and named, why one form is far more dangerous than another, where it hides in the human body and in everyday products, how it feeds the world's crops, and what happens when too much of it ends up in the wrong place. It is written for curious readers, students meeting the periodic table, and teachers who want a ready-made set of phosphorus facts. The early questions are the gentlest, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bodily fluid did an alchemist boil down by the bucketful in 1669 to make the first phosphorus?
Urine
Urine carries dissolved phosphates, so boiling it to a paste and roasting the residue left a waxy solid that glowed in the dark. He had been hoping for gold.
Q 02Which fictional detective discovers that a glowing, ghostly hound is simply a real dog painted with phosphorus?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes unmasks the trick in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where the villain coats a savage dog in phosphorus so that it looks like the demon of a family legend.
Q 03More than four-fifths of the phosphorus in the human body is locked away in which parts?
Bones and teeth
Bones and teeth hold about 85% of the body's phosphorus as a hard crystalline mineral. An average adult carries roughly 0.7 kilograms of the element in all.
Q 04Phosphoric acid gives which kind of fizzy soft drink its sharp, tangy bite?
Cola
Cola gets its tang from food-grade phosphoric acid, additive E338, which doubles as a preservative. Such drinks are sometimes called phosphate sodas.
Q 05The name phosphorus comes from Greek words meaning what?
Light-bearer
Light-bearer is the meaning of the Greek phōsphoros. Its first maker went further and named his glowing find phosphorus mirabilis, adding the Latin for miraculous.
Q 06Which legendary prize of alchemy was the discoverer of phosphorus hunting for when he stumbled on the element?
The philosopher's stone
The philosopher's stone was supposed to turn base metals such as lead into gold. He never found it, though his first wife's dowry paid for years of trying.
Q 07Phosphorus bullets were developed in the First World War to ignite which hydrogen-filled raiders over Britain?
Zeppelins
Zeppelins shrugged off ordinary bullets, which passed through the outer skin without lighting the gas inside. Burning phosphorus rounds changed that.
Q 08Which jaw-rotting disease struck Victorian workers who made white phosphorus matches?
Phossy jaw
Phossy jaw came from breathing phosphorus vapour year after year, which slowly destroyed the jaw. Fear of it helped spark the London matchgirls' strike of 1888.
Q 09Guano, a phosphorus-rich fertilizer traded worldwide in the 1800s, is the built-up droppings of which animals?
Seabirds
Seabirds nesting on islands off South America left droppings reported to lie over 30 metres deep. By the late 1800s the richest deposits were nearly mined out.
Q 10Phosphate groups alternate with sugars to build the long backbone of which famous biological molecule?
DNA
DNA is held together by a sugar-phosphate chain, with the genetic letters attached along it like the rungs of a ladder. Without phosphorus there is no double helix.
Q 11Which German alchemist, a former army officer, discovered phosphorus by accident and tried to keep it secret?
Hennig Brand
Hennig Brand is often called the first named person to discover a chemical element, since the earlier ones had been known since ancient times. He later sold his recipe for 200 thalers.
Q 12In Greek myth, the god Phosphorus personified which sight in the sky, now known to be the planet Venus?
The morning star
The morning star and its dusk counterpart were at first taken for two different objects, so each had its own god. Venus after sunset was called Hesperus.
Q 13How many protons sit in the nucleus of every phosphorus atom, giving the element its atomic number?
15
Q 21The three numbers on a bag of fertilizer stand for nitrogen, phosphorus and which other element?
Potassium
Potassium completes the trio known as NPK, after the chemical symbols N, P and K. Phosphorus is always the middle number on the label.
Q 22Which notorious poison is the element sitting directly below phosphorus in the periodic table?
Arsenic
Arsenic shares many chemical properties with phosphorus because the two are neighbours in one column. Its yellow form is even soft and waxy, like white phosphorus.
Q 23Which North African country holds by far the world's largest known reserves of phosphate rock?
Morocco
Morocco's deposits dwarf everyone else's, which is why forecasts of the world's future fertilizer supply lean so heavily on a single country.
15 is the atomic number of phosphorus, one place after silicon in the periodic table. Only one form of the atom, phosphorus-31, is stable.
Q 14White phosphorus glows by slowly reacting with which gas in the air, yet stays dark in the pure gas?
Oxygen
Oxygen makes the glow, but the reaction only runs within a certain range of pressures, so in the pure gas the glow switches off.
Q 15Chemists store white phosphorus submerged in which liquid to stop it bursting into flame in air?
Water
Water keeps the air off, and white phosphorus barely dissolves in it. Lumps that wash up on beaches are a known hazard to unwary collectors.
Q 16The striking strip on a box of safety matches contains which colour-named form of phosphorus?
Red
Red phosphorus on the strip meets the chemicals in the match head only at the moment of striking, which is why a safety match will not light on a wall or a boot.
Q 17The safety match, which moved the phosphorus from the match head to the box, was invented in which country?
Sweden
Sweden's Gustaf Erik Pasch patented the idea in 1844, and Swedish factories long held a near-monopoly on safety matches around the world.
Q 18Which charity opened a London match factory in 1891 to prove matches could be made without white phosphorus?
The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army and its founder William Booth used a safer but costlier form of phosphorus, and pressed local shopkeepers to stock only those matches.
Q 19Which molecule with three phosphate groups is nicknamed the energy currency of the living cell?
ATP
ATP is spent and rebuilt so quickly that a person gets through roughly their own body weight of it every day.
Q 20Phospholipids, fats with a phosphate head, line up in a double layer to build which part of every living cell?
The membrane
The membrane forms by itself: the phosphate heads face outward on both sides while the oily tails tuck inside, making a two-layer skin around the cell.
Q 24Phosphorus washing off farm fields into lakes feeds explosive blooms of which fast-growing organisms?
Algae
Algae multiply on the extra nutrient, then die and rot, stripping the lake of what fish need to breathe. The process is called eutrophication.
Q 25Phosphates were phased out of which household product from the 1970s because they over-fertilised lakes?
Detergent
Detergent makers added phosphates to help washing powder clean, but every wash sent a dose of fertilizer down the drain and on towards lakes and rivers.
Q 26In 2020 astronomers caused a stir by reporting which toxic gas, a possible sign of life, in the clouds of Venus?
Phosphine
Phosphine, one phosphorus atom bonded to three hydrogens, was reported in amounts no known lifeless process could explain. A later re-analysis found errors and failed to confirm it.
Q 27Which German port, the birthplace of phosphorus, was later devastated by phosphorus bombs in World War II?
Hamburg
Hamburg is where the element was first isolated in 1669. Nearly three centuries later, Allied incendiary raids turned the same substance on the city.
Q 28Which Anglo-Irish chemist, best known for his gas law, made phosphorus in 1680?
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle also used the element to light chemically tipped wooden splints, forerunners of the match, and his assistant turned phosphorus-making into a business.
Q 29Which French chemist, later sent to the guillotine, recognised phosphorus as a chemical element in 1777?
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier had earlier burned phosphorus and noticed that it gained weight, a clue that helped him work out what burning really is.
Q 30Astronomers studying the remnant Cassiopeia A confirmed that phosphorus is forged in which cosmic events?
Supernovae
Supernovae scatter the phosphorus they make across space. The debris of Cassiopeia A held up to 100 times more of it, relative to iron, than the Milky Way in general.