Yttrium
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40 free Yttrium trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Yttrium is one of those elements most people have never heard of and almost everyone uses. Element 39 hides inside phone screens, energy-saving lamps, lasers and medical treatments, and its story starts with an amateur chemist picking up a strangely heavy black rock in a village quarry. This quiz turns the best yttrium fun facts into multiple-choice questions: where the name comes from, who found and first isolated the metal, how it behaves, where it turns up in nature, and the surprising jobs it does in modern technology and medicine. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you get the story behind each fact. It suits chemistry students revising the periodic table, teachers who want an element-of-the-week activity, and anyone who likes a good science fact to share.
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Q 01Among edible plants, which leafy vegetable has been found to hold the largest amount of yttrium?
Cabbage
Cabbage tops the edible list, though the seeds of woody plants hold far more, as much as 700 parts per million.
Q 02Yttrium compounds doped with europium long supplied the red glow in the screens of which household device?
Television sets
Television sets used europium for the red itself, while the yttrium host soaked up energy from the electron gun and passed it along.
Q 03A cerium-doped yttrium phosphor is the key ingredient in LEDs that give off which color of light?
White
White LEDs pair a glowing chip with the phosphor, which gives off yellow light that blends with the chip's own.
Q 04A 1987 yttrium compound was the first superconductor to work above the boiling point of which liquefied gas?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen boils at 77 K and the compound superconducts at about 93 K, so a cheap coolant could replace costly liquid helium.
Q 05Yttrium oxide keeps the crystals stable in which diamond look-alike widely sold in jewelry?
Cubic zirconia
Cubic zirconia only keeps its cubic crystal form at ordinary temperatures with a stabilizer, typically an oxide of yttrium or calcium.
Q 06Yttrium metal turns up in which small component of some high-performance car engines?
Spark plugs
Spark plugs built for high performance can carry yttrium on their electrodes, the tips where the spark jumps.
Q 07Millions of tiny glass or resin beads carrying yttrium-90 are used to treat tumors in which organ?
Liver
Liver tumors have their own feeding blood vessels, so doctors send the radioactive beads straight into those vessels.
Q 08Yttrium and three other elements all take their names from Ytterby, a quarry village in which country?
Sweden
Sweden's Ytterby, on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, is described as the single richest source of element discoveries in the world.
Q 09Which country became the top exporter of yttrium-bearing heavy ores after California's Mountain Pass mine closed?
China
China's Bayan Obo district in Inner Mongolia holds the world's largest known deposit of this family of metals.
Q 10Yttrium, a soft silvery element in group 3, belongs to which broad class of the periodic table?
Transition metals
Transition metals fill the table's central block, and yttrium is the very first of them in the fifth period.
Q 11Yttrium is grouped with the fifteen lanthanides and one lighter metal in which family of seventeen elements?
Rare earths
Rare earths are not actually scarce: cerium, the most plentiful of them, is more common in Earth's crust than copper.
Q 12Solid yttrium is stable in air, but what can fine shavings of the metal do above 400 °C?
Catch fire
Catch fire they can, even though a solid lump is protected from the air by a thin oxide film that forms on its surface.
Q 13In the laser crystal YAG, Y stands for yttrium and A for aluminum; which mineral name does G stand for?
Garnet
Garnet names the crystal structure: YAG is a synthetic one, hard enough to have been cut as a simulated diamond.
Q 21The radioactive yttrium used in medicine is harvested from the decay of which long-lived isotope in nuclear fallout?
Strontium-90
Strontium-90 has a half-life of nearly 29 years, so a stock of it keeps yielding fresh medical yttrium, which lasts only days.
Q 22Yttrium-90 destroys nearby cancer cells in targeted therapies by emitting which type of radiation?
Beta particles
Beta particles do the work: the isotope is attached to antibodies that bind to cancer cells and deliver the dose on the spot.
Q 23Yttrium-based YAG lasers routinely clear the cloudy film that can follow which common eye operation?
Cataract surgery
Q 14Which element sits directly above yttrium in group 3 of the periodic table?
Scandium
Scandium is the lighter twin, yet yttrium behaves far more like the lanthanides than like its upstairs neighbor.
Q 15Most of the Solar System's yttrium was forged by slow neutron capture inside which kind of aging star?
Red giants
Red giants made roughly 72% of it, and the rest came from rapid neutron capture in far more violent cosmic events.
Q 16In the glowing mantles of camping lanterns, yttrium took the place of which radioactive element?
Thorium
Thorium made mantles glow brightly but is radioactive, so lantern maker Coleman switched to yttrium.
Q 17Which Finnish chemist first identified yttrium's oxide in a black rock from Ytterby, analyzed in 1794?
Johan Gadolin
Johan Gadolin found that about 38% of the rock was an unknown 'earth', and the element gadolinium was later named in his honor.
Q 18The Ytterby mine that yielded yttrium was dug for feldspar, a raw material for which industry?
Porcelain
Porcelain makers bought the feldspar, some of it traded to Britain and Poland, while the mine's quartz went to ironworks.
Q 19Carl Axel Arrhenius, who found the heavy black rock that held yttrium, earned his living as what?
Army lieutenant
Army lieutenant Arrhenius caught the chemistry bug while learning to test gunpowder at the Royal Mint, and minerals became his hobby.
Q 20Which German chemist, also famed for making urea in the lab, first isolated yttrium metal in 1828?
Friedrich Wöhler
Friedrich Wöhler had a remarkable 1828: he also isolated beryllium that year, a feat Antoine Bussy matched independently in France.
Cataract surgery can be followed by a clouding of the capsule left behind in the eye, and the same lasers also treat certain kinds of glaucoma.
Q 24Which element completes the famous 1987 superconductor made of yttrium, copper and oxygen?
Barium
Barium rounds out the compound nicknamed YBCO or '1-2-3', after its ratio of one yttrium atom to two of barium and three of copper.
Q 25Yttrium is added to strengthen alloys of aluminum and which other lightweight metal?
Magnesium
Magnesium alloys gain strength from yttrium, which also helps alloys resist oxidation at high temperatures.
Q 26Until the early 1920s, which two-letter chemical symbol was used for yttrium instead of today's Y?
Yt
Yt gave way to the single letter Y, which leaves yttrium as the only element whose symbol is that letter on its own.
Q 27Injections of yttrium-90 are used to calm inflamed joints in rheumatoid arthritis, especially which joints?
Knees
Knees are the main target of the procedure, known as radionuclide synovectomy, which treats the joint with radiation from the inside.
Q 28Deep-sea mud rich in yttrium was reported in 2018 near Marcus Island, a remote Pacific outpost of which country?
Japan
Japan's find, near the island it calls Minami-Torishima, was estimated to hold more than 16 million tons of sought-after metals.
Q 29Carl Axel Arrhenius first thought the black rock that yielded yttrium held which newly discovered heavy metal?
Tungsten
Tungsten was his hunch, so he sent samples to various chemists, and their analysis turned up something entirely new.
Q 30Which of these elements, like yttrium, takes its name from the quarry village of Ytterby?
Terbium
Terbium, erbium and ytterbium all share the honor, while holmium and thulium were merely first discovered in the same quarry's rock.