HTML and CSS Certification Practice Test

The property that specifically sets the background color of an element in CSS is background-color. This property allows you to define the color that fills the background area of an element, which can enhance the visual distinction of that element on the page.

When you use background-color, you can specify color values in various formats, such as named colors (like "red"), hexadecimal values (like "#ff0000"), RGB (like "rgb(255,0,0)"), or RGBA for transparency (like "rgba(255,0,0,0.5)"). This versatility makes it an essential property when designing and styling web pages to achieve the desired aesthetic.

The other options provided do not serve the same function. The color property is used to set the color of the text within an element, bgcolor is an obsolete HTML attribute that was used in older versions and is no longer recommended for CSS styling, and fill is a property used in SVG to set the color of shapes, but it does not apply to setting background colors in standard HTML/CSS. Thus, background-color is the correct choice for setting the background color of an element.