The detection of gas pollutants in atmosphere and indoor air is very important to human health and safety. Monoxide carbon (CO) is a common gas pollutant with high toxicity that mainly comes from the inadequacy oxidization of carbon such as oil, coal and petrol inadequacy combustion, auto-gas and some natural disasters whose limit value in air is lower than 6.0 mg·m-3 in the national standard. Due to its toxicity and uneasy detection, it is one of very dangerous component in the silent killer. Recently, several methods, including infra-red absorption, gas chromatography, potentiometry, Hg replacement, spectrophotometry, I2O5 and PdCl2 nake-eye, semiconductor sensor have been reportedly used for the detection of CO. To our best knowledge, there are no SPR absorption methods for CO, based on the NG SPR absorption. In this paper, the reaction between CO and HAuCl4 was studied with absorption spectrophotometry and transmission electron microscopy (TEM)while a simple and rapid SPR absorption method was developed for the determination of trace CO. In pH 7.2 phosphate buffer solutions, monoxide carbon reduced HAuCl4 to form nanogold (NG) particles with the size of about 45 nm that exhibited surface plasmon resonance (SPR) absorption peak at 540 nm and three energy spectral peaks at 1.70 keV, 2.20 and 9.70 keV for gold element. The analytical conditions were examined, and a pH 7.2 phosphate buffer solution with a concentration of 40 mmoL·L-1 PO3-4, a concentration of 40.0 μg· mL-1 HAuCl4 and a reaction time of 5 min was selected for use. Under the selected conditions, the SPR absorption peak value was linear to CO concentration in the range of 0.2～8.75 μg· mL-1, with a detection limit of 0.1 μg· mL-1 CO. According to the procedure, the influence of coexistent substances on the determination of 1.0 mg·L-1 CO was tested, with a relative error of ±5%. Results indicated that 200 times SO2-3, PO3-4, SO2-4, CO2-3 and NO-3, 100 times Zn2+, K+, BrO-3, Na2S, ethanol, methanol, 80 times Ni2+, Cr3+, Co2+, Ca2+, Mg2+, Fe3+, glucose, Pb2+, Al3+, SeO2-3, Na2S2O3, formaldehyde, 50 times Mn2+ do not interfere with the determination. It showed that this SPR method had good selectivity. The CO content in air samples was determined with the SPR method, with a relative standard deviation (RSD) of 1.8%～4.2%, the SPR method results were agreement with that of the gas chromatography (GC).