Which term best describes a material's ability to withstand a blow or impact?

The term that best describes a material's ability to withstand a blow or impact is toughness. Toughness is defined as the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. It is a critical property for materials that are subjected to sudden forces or impacts, as it ensures that they can endure such stresses without breaking.

In applications where materials might face shocks or sudden loads, toughness becomes particularly important, as it allows the material to deform and absorb some of the energy from the impact, preventing catastrophic failure.

Brittleness refers to a material's tendency to fracture without significant deformation when stressed. Malleability describes a material's capacity to deform under compression, often allowing it to be shaped into thin sheets, while ductility relates to a material's ability to undergo significant plastic deformation before rupture, typically under tensile stress. While both malleability and ductility are important for forming and shaping materials, they do not specifically address the material's resilience to impact as toughness does.