← 🧪 Chemistry · usually met in Std 7-10
Metals conduct, shine, bend and lose electrons. Non-metals mostly do the opposite. The line between them is a smudge, not a border.
Metals conduct heat and electricity, can be hammered into sheets and drawn into wire, and are usually solid and shiny. Chemically, what they have in common is a tendency to give electrons away. Non-metals are generally poor conductors, brittle when solid, and tend to accept electrons instead. Between the two sits a handful of in-between elements, the metalloids, and silicon — a metalloid — is what the entire computing industry is built on.
The reactivity series puts metals in order of how readily they react. It explains a lot of practical life at once: why a more reactive metal displaces a less reactive one from its compound, why iron rusts and gold does not, and why extracting aluminium from its ore needs vast amounts of electricity while copper does not.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Metals and non-metals” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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