SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 6 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

‘Au’ is the symbol for which of the following elements?

(a)Gold
(b)Aluminium
(c)Argon
(d)Silver

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Au is the symbol for gold, atomic number 79. The letters do not come from the English name at all — they come from the Latin aurum.

That is the entire rule being tested. A small set of elements known since antiquity kept symbols built from their Latin names: iron is Fe from ferrum, lead Pb from plumbum, silver Ag from argentum. Read Au as 'aurum' and option (a) follows.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Aluminium — Aluminium is Al. It is the natural guess because the English name opens with those letters, but aluminium was only isolated in the 19th century and took its symbol from its modern name.
(c)
Argon — Argon is Ar, a noble gas identified in 1894 and again symbolised from its own name. Ar and Au differ by a single letter, which is exactly why it is on the list.
(d)
Silver — Silver is Ag, from the Latin argentum — the same Latin-symbol rule as gold, which makes it the sharpest distractor here: right rule, wrong metal.

Concept

Chemical symbols come from two sources, and the split is historical.

Elements named in the modern era take symbols from their own names: Al aluminium, Ar argon, Ca calcium. Elements known to the ancient world carry symbols from their Latin names.

That Latin list is short and worth memorising whole: Au gold (aurum), Ag silver (argentum), Fe iron (ferrum), Cu copper (cuprum), Sn tin (stannum), Pb lead (plumbum), Hg mercury (hydrargyrum), Na sodium (natrium), K potassium (kalium), Sb antimony (stibium). Every mistake in this question type comes from that list.

Key facts

Gold has the symbol Au, from the Latin aurum, and atomic number 79.
Aluminium is Al with atomic number 13, argon is Ar with 18, and silver is Ag with 47.
Latin-derived symbols include Fe (ferrum), Pb (plumbum), Ag (argentum), Na (natrium), K (kalium), Sn (stannum) and Hg (hydrargyrum).

Study next

Latin-derived chemical symbols and the metals known to antiquityGold, silver and copper as the group 11 coinage metalsGroups of the periodic table, which this shift also tests at General Awareness Q.15 on alkaline earth metals

Common traps

Reading Au as a shortened English name and choosing aluminium.
Knowing the Latin rule but attaching it to silver, whose Ag comes from the same source.

Symbol-to-element is a one-line recall slot. This shift also asks a periodic-table question at General Awareness Q.15, on which group radium, barium and strontium belong to.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.