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Valuable Substances

Are you a true one-percenter? See if you can name these expensive items!
Quiz by Quizmaster
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Last updated: June 5, 2023
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First submittedAugust 8, 2014
Times taken46,054
Average score70.0%
Rating4.40
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Description
Substance
What King Midas loved
Gold
A pound of this was once worth £1,
but is now worth about £275
Silver
Substance sold by HP and Canon;
Per gallon price is $2,700
Printer Ink
The four "precious" gemstones
Diamond
Ruby
Sapphire
Emerald
One of these fish sold for
$1.8 million in Tokyo
Bluefin tuna
Green rock popular in China
Jade
Red (or orange) spice made
from flowers
Saffron
Description
Substance
Common ice cream flavoring
Vanilla
If you get bit by a snake you might gladly
pay $14,000 for a single vial of...
Antivenom
Sturgeon eggs
Caviar
Beef named for a Japanese city
Kobe beef
Fungus that once sold for $100,000/pound
White truffle
The cost of this 94th element
is $4,000 a gram
Plutonium
Fatty duck liver
Foie gras
World's lightest solid
Aerogel
Whale substance once used in fragrances
Ambergris
You would need trillions of dollars to make
one gram of this "opposite" material
Antimatter
+6
Level 93
Aug 9, 2014
Yes! I knew that reading Moby Dick would finally pay off!
+1
Level 71
Aug 30, 2020
I unfortunately forgot about ambergris :( Question though: would spermaceti count for that question? I know it was used for a long of things but I'm not sure if it was used in fragrance or not.
+2
Level 70
Aug 25, 2014
Why do I know Aerogel?
+8
Level 60
Jun 8, 2015
Because that stuff is freaky and awesome. Once learned of, is easy to remember because of aforementioned freaky awesomeness :D
+3
Level 75
Apr 13, 2017
Never heard of it or Walter White.
+5
Level 82
Aug 25, 2014
No Unobtainium?
+3
Level 81
Apr 13, 2017
How about adamantium?
+3
Level 89
Apr 13, 2017
Or Vibranium?
+11
Level 62
Aug 30, 2020
RIP Chadwick Boseman.
+1
Level 20
Aug 31, 2020
Unobtainium from Mining sim!
+2
Level 77
Aug 25, 2014
Accept fois or foix gras as well? - had to look up the correct spelling.
+17
Level 78
Aug 25, 2014
And at ballparks all across America, beer is $64/gallon. Closely followed by a gallon of water at any American airport.
+1
Level 69
Aug 25, 2014
Good one!
+1
Level 87
Apr 13, 2017
+1
+3
Level 39
Apr 16, 2017
I just did the math and water at the stadium near my location is CAD 4.75 a bottle, so 33.25 per gallon
+3
Level 68
Aug 25, 2014
Please think about accepting "toner" or "printer toner" for ink.
+7
Level 50
Aug 25, 2014
You tend not to measure powders like toner in gallons though.

Toner itself isn't that expensive compared to ink, at least for how many pages you are getting out of a cartridge's worth (although laser printers and the cartridges can be much more expensive).

+2
Level 63
Aug 25, 2014
Saffron spelling cost me, and foie gras very nearly did.
+1
Level 66
Jan 9, 2019
yup tried saffran saphran saffrane saphrane safran safrane...then gave up ( it hink, might ve tried again thinking i missed one). Usually when the word is written is one way in my language it is easy to predict how it will be written in english, often follows the same pattern. But here unexpectedly an o appeared
+1
Level 45
Aug 25, 2014
26 seconds left, feeling pretty cool.
+1
Level 72
Aug 25, 2014
Not pretending for scientific accuracy and knowledge in the field, but isn't "black matter" the same as "antimatter"?
+10
Level 93
Feb 1, 2019
Do you mean dark matter? nobody knows what that is so maybe, but probably not - if most of the universe is antimatter we would see some pretty big explosions basically everywhere
+1
Level 73
Aug 25, 2014
Isn't roe the actual term for the fish eggs and caviar the processed result?
+7
Level 71
Oct 14, 2014
No. Roe is any fish egg. Caviar is specifically roe from the sturgeon.
+2
Level 74
Aug 25, 2014
Post WW2, merino wool was famously worth a "pound a pound" too
+2
Level 83
Aug 26, 2014
You should have the dollar amounts listed in another column, just for fun.
+5
Level ∞
Aug 26, 2014
I wanted to, but it was too hard to get good data on the price of weird stuff like ambergris.
+1
Level 69
Jan 25, 2018
Plus silver and gold change constantly!
+1
Level 93
Feb 1, 2019
Maybe you could put the highest recorded price?
+2
Level 68
Sep 13, 2014
what!? no gasoline? =)
+2
Level 69
Oct 20, 2015
I thought caviar came from the beluga whale
+17
Level 86
Jan 4, 2016
There is a beluga sturgeon too. But seriously, anybody should know that whales don't lay eggs...
+1
Level 76
Apr 13, 2017
Are fish really a "substance"?
+15
Level 86
Jul 8, 2018
Uhh, what kind of crazy ghost fish have you been eating?
+3
Level 66
Jan 9, 2019
if you can touch it it has substance
+2
Level 79
Jun 5, 2023
Stephen Jay Gould has concluded that there's no such thing as a fish. I heard about it on QI so it must be true... :)
+1
Level 56
Apr 13, 2017
And then there's me guessing "anti-hydrogen" before "antimatter". I need to stop over-thinking.
+1
Level 70
Apr 13, 2017
Can you accept Safron as well?
+1
Level 59
Apr 15, 2017
Cosmetics. Try pricing them sometimes.
+4
Level 93
Feb 1, 2019
For Aerogel maybe it means least dense solid. Pretty sure a pound of that and a pound of anything else weigh the same. I was guessing carbon nanotubes which are solid but very very small so would technically be the lightest. Even if you had a piece of aerogel that small it would be a lot heavier because the lightness is just due to it having it gaps filled with air and on a small scale there would be a lot fewer gaps (if any).
+2
Level 82
Aug 30, 2020
by your logic so substance can be heavier than any other. That's not how the term is conventionally understood.
+1
Level 83
May 24, 2023
I tried lithium, which has the lowest atomic weight.
+1
Level 84
Aug 30, 2020
Does the ink question refer to liquid ink (typical for "jet" type printers), or powdered toner (typical for photocopiers/laser printers). Those are two distinct materials, and if toner is the intended answer, I would consider excluding "ink" as even a "fill-in."
+6
Level 76
Sep 2, 2020
They mean liquid ink. Powders are generally not measured in gallons.
+9
Level 75
Aug 30, 2020
For those needing some encouragement today, remember that you are more valuable than any of these
+3
Level 71
Jul 10, 2023
In an immaterial, ineffable sense, I'm sure most would agree you're right. But the average wrongful death award in the United States is something like $500k to $1000k and if we assume an average body weight of 60kg, that comes out to about $12.50 a gram, which is worth less than silver, let alone most of these items.

Of course, my source data here isn't great--it's a ballpark estimate based on law offices' advertising sites, not a study (couldn't easily find one) and so it's very approximate. And you might consider valuing "you" this way to be odious or incomplete (note that the these awards are exclusive of other things that might be awarded like punitive damages or pain and suffering). But I don't think it's so far off as to be that inaccurate, and it is usually calculated with something like a systematic process, with standardized actuarial tables, etc.

That's only if you think you can assign a dollar value per pound on a human being. If so, is there a better way?

+1
Level 74
Jul 10, 2023
Your estimate is too low; the value of a life in Western countries is probably several million dollars. See Wikipedia.
+1
Level 71
Aug 22, 2023
To whom, though? From the article:

As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one.

I think that has even less intuitive corresponding to any person's notion of "value". But I thank you, because I doubt there's any very satisfying way of approaching this idea of value.

+2
Level 68
Aug 31, 2020
I only knew ambergris from Bob’s Burgers haha
+1
Level 82
Jul 10, 2023
Futurama for me. "Precious ambergris!"
+6
Level 65
Sep 1, 2020
I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store.
+2
Level 58
Sep 1, 2020
I kept trying "koi" and "carp."
+4
Level 59
Jun 5, 2023
@Antimatter
+11
Level 82
Jun 5, 2023
Antidote can't be accepted?
+1
Level 65
Jun 5, 2023
Change the name from Ruby to Rubie.

Ruby looks like Rub-E.

Rubie looks like Roo-Bee.

+12
Level 83
Jun 6, 2023
...what
+4
Level 79
Jun 6, 2023
'Get bit' should be changed to 'get bitten'.
+2
Level 83
Jun 7, 2023
Unfortunately Americans seem to prefer the former.
+1
Level 66
Jul 10, 2023
Really it should be "are bitten" no? The "get" is superfluous.
+4
Level 58
Jul 10, 2023
Can you please accept Antidote for Antivenom?
+1
Level 74
Jul 10, 2023
Man that's what i'm saying... or at least antitoxin
+1
Level 67
Jul 10, 2023
Printer ink only costs a few pennies to manufacture.
+2
Level 74
Jul 10, 2023
Source?