Two solids are shown below. One is a semiconductor and one is an insulator. Which one is which? Explain your reasoning.

Video transcript

Welcome back everyone identify the insulator and semiconductor based on the images of the two solids. So here we see for our first solid we'll call it solid A. We have a yellow color and we would say that this yellow color is from the absorption a visible light, meaning that we would therefore have a lower energy electron transition which corresponds to being a semiconductor and lets her called a semiconductor metal has properties that lie between semiconducting electricity and also insulating electricity. So moving on to our second metal, which is metal B. We see that we have just a white colored compound here, so there's no absorption of visible light, meaning that we have a higher energy electron transition which will correspond to metal B being an insulator. So the only correct choice to identify the semiconductor versus insulator is going to be choice B, which states that the yellow compound is a semiconductor and the white compound is an insulator because the yellow compound absorbs light in the visible spectrum, which is why it has that yellow color. I hope everything I explained was clear B is our final answer. If you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll see everyone in the next practice video