All About Gold

by Aaron McLain

Gold is one of the chemical elements. It’s atomic number is 79. This valuable precious metal is sought around the world. Gold is used for several different purposes like jewelry.

You can find gold in the form of nuggets or grains within rocks. Sometimes gold is found in places inside of rocks called veins. Veins are spaces in a rock that contain things like crystals.

Gold has many great characteristics. It is soft, easy to shape, and is dense. It is the most malleable of all metals known. If a metal is malleable it means it can be hammered into thin sheets.

The purest form of gold is known as pure gold. Pure gold doesn’t contain any additional substances. It is a very attractive metal. It has a bright yellow luster about it. A bonus you get with pure gold is its ability to not oxidize in air or water. This allows it to keep its luster and shine.

Pure gold is too soft for day to day use. To get around this people added things to it to make it harder. The used base metals like copper to give it strength. Because of this there was a need to create a measure for the amount of pure gold in an item. The unit of measure became known as the carat (k).

Gold has been mined for many years. In 2006 a study was done to see just how much gold had been pulled out of the earth. The results were staggering. Aproximately 158,000 tons of gold were pulled out of the earth by the end of 2006. That is a lot of gold.

Gold has many excellent qualities. It is a great conductor of electricity. It is used in electronics. It has a unique ability to avoid corrosion or oxidation. This makes it a perfect metal for dentistry.

Gold has been most known for its use as money in the past. This ended with the introduction of paper currency. The reason being that there is only so much gold in the world. Paper money can be printed without limit. The last country to use gold to back their money was Switzerland.

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