What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0620 Chemistry papers and filtered to extraction of metals. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
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What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on extraction of metals, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Saying carbon is the reducing agent in the blast furnace, when the equation shows carbon monoxide reducing the ore.
- Writing the ore as iron(II) oxide rather than iron(III) oxide.
- Saying limestone is added to provide heat, rather than to remove the silicon dioxide impurity as slag.
- Saying slag sinks below the iron, when it floats.
- Saying cryolite is a catalyst, when it is a solvent that lowers the operating temperature.
- Saying the carbon anodes wear away by rubbing, rather than by burning in the oxygen released there.
- Extracting aluminium with carbon, which cannot reduce the oxide of a metal above it in the series.
- Producing the aluminium at the anode instead of the cathode.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Extraction of metals revision notes.