The mnemonic 'Bad boys race our young girls behind victory garden walls' is used as an easy way to remember the colors for which electrical component?

• A. Resistors
• B. Capacitors
• C. Diodes
• D. Inductors

Answer: (A)

That phrase encodes the resistor color code. Each color corresponds to a digit from 0 to 9: Black 0, Brown 1, Red 2, Orange 3, Yellow 4, Green 5, Blue 6, Violet 7, Grey 8, White 9. In most resistor markings, the first two bands are the significant digits and the third band is the multiplier (the power of ten you multiply those digits by), with a possible fourth band for tolerance. So this mnemonic is a handy way to recall the digits used to read resistor values.

Capacitors, diodes, and inductors don’t use this exact color-digit sequence for their standard values, so the mnemonic is specifically about reading resistors. For example, a resistor with brown, black, orange bands would be 10 × 10^3 = 10 kΩ (with the tolerance given by a fourth band, such as gold for ±5%).