What property measures a material's resistance to pulling apart?

• A. Ultimate Elongation
• B. Solvent
• C. Sidelite
• D. Tensile strength

Answer: (D)

The property that describes how strongly a material resists being pulled apart is tensile strength. It’s the maximum stress the material can endure in tension before it breaks. Stress is the force applied divided by the cross-sectional area, so tensile strength reflects how much pulling force per area the material can withstand. In a tensile test, you pull on a sample until it fractures, and the peak stress reached is the tensile strength. This is different from ultimate elongation, which measures how much the material can stretch before breaking (ductility) rather than how strong it is. The other terms describe unrelated ideas: a solvent relates to chemical interaction, and sidelite isn’t a standard material-property measure.