Platinum Trivia
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59 free Platinum trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This platinum trivia quiz covers element 78 from every angle: the chemistry (why it dissolves only in aqua regia, its six natural isotopes, why bulk platinum never oxidizes), the history (pre-Columbian goldsmiths in Ecuador, Spanish miners who threw it away as an impurity, Antonio de Ulloa's 1748 report, William Brownrigg, Chabaneau and Spain's 'platinum age', Wollaston's discovery of palladium and rhodium in platinum ore), and the geology, from the Merensky Reef in South Africa's Bushveld Complex to Norilsk and the Sudbury Basin. There are also questions on how platinum is used: catalytic converters and Gerhard Ertl's Nobel Prize, the platinum-iridium metre and kilogram standards, resistance thermometers, cisplatin and cancer chemotherapy, platinum prints in photography, the American Platinum Eagle and Russia's platinum rubles, and platinum as a byword for prestige, from RIAA platinum records and platinum credit cards to Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. Some questions are easy for anyone who paid attention in chemistry; others will test collectors, chemists and metallurgists. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on platinum, the platinum group and related topics, and each explanation adds one further detail. If you like this, try our periodic table and gold quizzes too.
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Q 01Which chemical symbol stands for platinum, element 78?
Pt
Pt is element 78, one place before gold. Europe's chemists only recognised it around 1750, though smiths in the Americas had been working it for centuries.
Q 02Platinum's name comes from the Spanish 'platina', which means what?
Little silver
Little silver was a put-down. The Spanish who met it in the rivers of their American colonies rated it a worthless impurity in the metal they were after, and often simply threw it away.
Q 03Which 1930s Hollywood star was known as the 'Platinum Blonde'?
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow insisted the shade was natural, but her hairdresser later revealed it took weekly rounds of ammonia, bleach and soap flakes.
Q 04Which gemstone names the US music award that ranks above multi-platinum?
Diamond
Diamond has a shortcut: each disc of a multi-disc set counts as a unit, so OutKast's double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below got there with half the usual sales.
Q 05What made platinum so hard for early European metalworkers to use?
Their furnaces could not melt it
Their furnaces could not melt it: platinum liquefies near 1,770°C, about 700 degrees above gold. Smiths in the Americas had long got round that by heating its grains with gold until they fused.
Q 06Platinum resists single acids but dissolves in which of the alchemists' liquids, famed for dissolving gold?
Aqua regia
Aqua regia, 'royal water', is a blend of two acids that each fail alone. Alchemists gave it the name because it could dissolve gold, the metal that shrugged off their other acids.
Q 07Platinum gauze is the catalyst that turns ammonia into which acid?
Nitric acid
Nitric acid. Wilhelm Ostwald's process is still how it is made, and the acid goes on to become ammonium nitrate fertiliser, so platinum has a hand in growing the world's food.
Q 08Which car engine part is often tipped with platinum so that it lasts far longer than a copper one?
Spark plugs
Spark plugs. Platinum shrugs off both the heat and the electric arc at the tip, so the electrode can be made finer and sharper without melting or corroding away.
Q 09Gerhard Ertl's 2007 chemistry Nobel honoured his work on how a platinum surface makes which poisonous gas harmless?
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide picks up an extra oxygen atom on the platinum and leaves as carbon dioxide. Ertl found that this seemingly simple reaction speeds up, slows down and can even turn chaotic.
Q 10Because US law lets the Treasury mint platinum coins of any face value, commentators in 2013 proposed a single coin worth what?
$1 trillion
$1 trillion. The plan was to deposit the coin at the Federal Reserve and keep paying the bills without Congress raising the debt ceiling; the Treasury and the Fed turned it down.
Q 11The La Tolita people, early workers of platinum, lived on which country's Pacific coast?
Ecuador
Ecuador. Some 2,000 years ago its smiths heated platinum grains with gold until they fused into an alloy they could shape, long before Europe's scholars knew the metal.
Q 12In 1799, which country cast its brand-new unit of length, the metre, as a bar of platinum?
France
France. Revolutionary scientists defined the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, then fixed it in a platinum bar locked away in the national archives.
Q 13Antonio de Ulloa, the Spanish officer who first described platinum for science, was captured on his voyage home by which country's navy?
Britain
Q 21Chemistry students traditionally dip a loop of platinum wire into a sample to carry out which classic test?
A flame test
A flame test. Held in a burner, the sample shows its colour while platinum adds none of its own, which is why the costly wire is the classic choice.
Q 22Which US state holds the country's largest platinum deposit, the Stillwater Complex in the Beartooth Mountains?
Montana
Montana. The Stillwater Complex is the only place in the United States that mines the metal on any scale, yet it is far smaller than the world's three giant deposits.
Q 23Which African country's Great Dyke, a long ridge of ancient rock, holds one of the world's biggest platinum deposits?
Zimbabwe
Britain. Ulloa was taken to London as a prisoner in 1745, but scholars there took up his cause and he was soon released to sail home to Spain.
Q 14Which metal, found in platinum ore by William Wollaston, did he name after the rose colour of its salts?
Rhodium
Rhodium, from the Greek for rose. Wollaston found it in the leftovers when he dissolved platinum ore for a business selling the purified metal, a venture that made him rich.
Q 15Henrik Scheffer's 1752 description of platinum called it by what name?
White gold
White gold. Scheffer found the newcomer resisted corrosion just as gold does, and his study helped establish it as a precious metal instead of a nuisance.
Q 16At oil refineries, platinum catalysts reshape low-grade fuel mainly to raise which property of gasoline?
Its octane rating
Its octane rating. Refiners found that platinum could rearrange cheap naphtha into high-octane gasoline, and after the Second World War their demand for the metal soared.
Q 17Which metal did William Wollaston find in platinum ore in 1802 and name after a newly discovered asteroid?
Palladium
Palladium honours the asteroid Pallas. Wollaston first sold the metal anonymously through a London shop, and a rival chemist dismissed it as a mere alloy before he owned up.
Q 18Roughly how much would a one-litre milk carton weigh if it were filled with solid platinum?
About 21 kg
About 21 kg: platinum is over 21 times as dense as water and denser even than gold, so its heavy grains sink to the bottom of a prospector's pan, which is how the Spanish first met it.
Q 19Hans Merensky's 1924 discovery of a platinum-rich reef lay in which country?
South Africa
South Africa. The Merensky Reef, part of the Bushveld Complex, turned the country into the world's leading platinum producer, and a century on it still mines most of the supply.
Q 20Which jewellery house sold the famous blue Hope gem, now set in a platinum pendant, to a Washington heiress in 1911?
Cartier
Cartier. Evalyn Walsh McLean had turned the gem down, so Pierre Cartier had it reset in a more modern style, and she changed her mind.
Zimbabwe. Despite its name, the Great Dyke is not a single wall of rock but four igneous complexes in a row, mined for chromium, nickel and gold as well as platinum.
Q 24A small town named Platinum, after the metal once mined there, lies in which US state?
Alaska
Alaska. The metal turned up near Goodnews Bay in 1926, and within about a decade a boomtown with its own post office had taken its name; dredges worked the creeks there for decades.
Q 25Platinum-group metals settle to the bottom of copper electrorefining cells as what?
Anode mud
Anode mud. The precious metals are too unreactive to dissolve along with the copper, so they drop out as sludge; far from being waste, that mud is where refiners collect their platinum.
Q 26Platinum is a standard metal in which implanted medical device?
Pacemakers
Pacemakers. Their parts sit bathed in body fluids for years, and platinum neither corrodes there nor reacts with the body, which is also why dentists have long used it.
Q 27Which car part is the biggest single use of platinum, ahead even of jewellery?
Catalytic converters
Catalytic converters. They reached most new American cars with the 1975 model year, and because lead ruins the catalyst they also forced the switch to unleaded gasoline.
Q 28Which Michael Jackson album has been certified platinum more than 30 times over in the United States?
Thriller
Thriller. A title is no guide to these things: Kiss named a 1978 greatest-hits set Double Platinum, and it was certified platinum just once.
Q 29Humphry Davy made strips of platinum glow white-hot with an electric current, an early step toward which invention?
The light bulb
The light bulb. Davy's glowing strips soon burned out, and platinum cost far too much for a lamp in every home, so later inventors turned to carbon.
Q 30From 1889 to 1960 the world's standard metre was a bar of platinum hardened with 10% of which metal?
Iridium
Iridium made the bar significantly harder than pure platinum. It kept the job until 1960, when physicists redefined the metre by wavelengths of light and freed it from any object.