Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

Why is metal considered "frozen" if it's room temperature?

Because it's not at freezing temperatures, so why call it frozen?

6 Answers

Relevance
  • 2 weeks ago

    Sure it is at freezing temperature. lead is liquid at about 621 degrees. So at 620 degrees it will freeze, at room temperature it is very very frozen.

    32 f is only the freezing point of water.

    The steel on your car frame is frozen solid, depending on he type of steel you talk about it is frozen below the temperature of 1425 degrees F to as high as 5000 degrees F

    We are about 80% water which is why the freezing point of water feels freezing to us. 

  • ?
    Lv 7
    2 weeks ago

    Think of the 3 common states of matter:  solid, liquid, gas.  A metal being considered "frozen" refers to its state, not its temperature. Frozen can mean that the molecules are not free to move around but are locked into  position.  If you heat a metal it can become a liquid, keep increasing the heat and it eventually becomes a gas.  

  • David
    Lv 5
    2 weeks ago

    Frozen means in a solid state because it is below the melting point of that material.

    Frozen does not just mean ice or cold.

    Metal becomes liquid if its hot enough.

  • ?
    Lv 4
    2 weeks ago

    For the metal it is at a frozen temperature.

    Different substances have different temperatures at which they melt or freeze.

    I suspect you may be in the USA. Most people on here seem to be. As far as I am aware you still use the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. That is quite a flawed scale. Here in the UK we use the Celsius scale. It is better but not perfect.

    On either scale the person who devised them set arbitrary values. Both Fahrenheit and Celsius decided that at standard pressure ice melts and becomes liquid at zero degrees and it boils and turns into a liquid at one hundred degrees. What Fahrenheit did not realise is that to do this correctly the substance must be pure and he used impure water. So on his scale pure water turns from solid ice into liquid water at 32 degrees F.

    Go to any high school physics lab and you will be able to get the teacher to pour boiling water over your hands without it scalding you. This is because boiling point depends on atmospheric pressure and not only temperature. Lower the pressure and water can be boiled (turned from liquid to gas) at a temperature that would not scald you. I still remember my school physics teacher telling us you cannot brew a decent cup of tea up Mount Everest because water boils at about 60 degrees C which is not hot enough to brew tea properly.

    So different substances change physical state at different temperatures. The temperatures at sea level that determine the physical state of water are not fixed constants for every substance. Therefore, something does not have to be below zero/32 degrees C/F to be considered frozen.

  • 2 weeks ago

    Two ways of looking at this: don't call it frozen if you consider freezing to be only a function of temperature (another way to express lack of heat), or consider that "freezing" is object-specific so the temperature of freezing depends on the object (freezing is not temperature specific, it is object-specific).

    Which world do you live in?  The world I live in sees materials become solid under particular pressure-temperature conditions that are particular to the object itself, and no P-T conditions are identical for any substance.

  • 2 weeks ago

    Different materials become solids at different temperatures.

    Only utter idiots cannot grasp that steel and water have different temperatures at which they turn solid.

Still have questions? Get your answers by asking now.