I'm John Batchel with my good friend Simon Constable, writing at the Wall Street

Journal and other distinguished publications, and Simon has put up a quiz. What do you know about rare earths? Simon, can you know

less than zero? Because that's me. All right. You want to know, is there 10 questions. The first one,

I had to remember what the periodic table was. The question is, the periodic table identifies 118 elements.

News to me. How many of those elements are rare earths? Simon, this is ridiculous. That's the first

question. You didn't, would you start? Let's make it clear that they're not going to get anything

right. Was that your thinking? Oh, no, I thought putting it in the context of the, of the, basically, of the periodic table,

I figured people would go back to their chemistry class when they were in school and think

about that in that way. Yes, it is tricky. I would have got negative results if I'd

actually taken this without having written

it. Now, I wrote this and with some help from Editors, who were very kind to me on this particular

thing. But yes, it is tricky, but it's more of a way of explaining things to people that

isn't just a written piece.

I think it was... The periodic table identifies 118 elements.

How many of those are rare earths?

And the number is 17.

Oh, sure.

That was just at the tip of my tongue.

Let's go to the next question.

How rare are rare earth elements?

Now, I know to say that rare earths are not rare, but that's everything I know.

You break it down to rarest naturally occurring elements in the earth's crust, question mark,

...