General knowledge tests can hide unpleasant pitfalls and this is why not everyone knows how to answer this question.
An individual’s culture can be divided into many facets, most of which clearly derive from study while others are the result of experience and knowledge of the world around us and this is what generally it is called general culture: this concept can cover many different topics and many questions that fall into this category can seriously challenge even people who think they know a lot about many different topics.
Today’s general knowledge test concerns a topic that is not always covered in schools or is often replaced by other notions that fall within the discipline that we can define as Earth sciences even if in this case let’s talk more about the chemistry of our planet: a question that many know the answer to while others have difficulty and perhaps don’t know or don’t remember What gas is most present in the air we breathe.
What is the composition of the air we breathe: here is the most present gas
The answer to this question would seem obvious and everyone, right off the bat, they would clearly respond to oxygen: it is the chemical agent that allows us to breathe and survive on Earth and therefore it would seem strange if it were not the most present gas in the air in terms of percentage, but in reality this is not the case: oxygen is not the most present gas in the air because there is another gas that is present at over 70% and that is almost always ignored.
To answer this general knowledge question we have also provided three options and, as you can see, oxygen is not even taken into consideration: the three answers to choose from are argon, nitrogen and helium of which two are part of the list of noble gases, that is, those that do not need to form chemical bonds to achieve the stability given by 8 electrons.
Helium is a fundamental gas that is present for example in the Sun, but if we talk about air that is present in the Earth’s atmosphere then the gas present in the highest percentage is nitrogen: this gas, in fact, is present for 78% in terms of volume in the air we breathe while oxygen is the second most present gas with a percentage of 20.95%. Argon, on the other hand, is present for only 0.93%.
