Activation energy?? The energy needed to start a chemical reaction is called activation energy
Explanation:
Reagents: Water , 1.0 M HCl, Conc. 
Metal-1 = Magnesium
Metal-2 = Sodium
Metal-3 = Silver
a) Out of these three metals sodium is a soft metal which can be easily cut with help of knife.Sodium metal reacts violently with water to form hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide.

b) Out of magnesium and silver, magnesium metal reacts readily with HClto form magnesium chloride and hydrogen gas. Where as silver being noble metal doesn't get attacked by the HCl.

c) Silver is a noble metal. And noble metals only react with concentrated
that is nitric acid.

d) When few drops of HCl were added to the solution of silver and
. This will leads to the formation of nascent chloride which reacts with silver metal present in the solution to give silver chloride.


Answer: A) Ar
Explanation: Argon [Ar] has an atomic no of 18 and the electronic configuration is:
Ar :
Chlorine [Cl] has atomic no of 17 and thus the electronic configuration is :
Cl :
Magnesium [Mg] has atomic no of 12 and thus the electronic configuration is :
Mg :
Sodium has atomic no of 11 and thus the electronic configuration is :
Cl :
As we move across a period the number of electrons are being added to the same shell but the number of protons increases, thus the electrons are being tightly held and thus the atomic radius keeps on decreasing.
Thus the smallest atom would have a tightly bound electron nearer to the nucleus. As argon is the last element of the period, it is the smallest in the period and thus largest amount of energy will be required to remove the outermost electron.