Gold
 | Properties of Gold A mineral and a metal, gold's atomic number is 79 | ||
 | Uses of Gold Got a cell phone? You got gold... | ||
 | History of Gold Mans best mineral for 6000 years! | ||
 | Mining for Gold Gold is found in Earth's crust. How do we get it? | ||
 | Impacts of Gold Mining One gold band produces 20 tonnes of waste!? |
A mineral found in earth's crust, gold is a precious metal.
For more than 6000 years, gold has played an important role human history.
Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, yellow metal.
Of all the world’s metals, it is the easiest to shape—even into very thin threads, without breaking!
A single gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet of nine square feet (one square meter), or an ounce into 300 square feet (27.87 square meters).
Gold is also an excellent conductor of heat and electricity - and it is rust-proof.
Valued for its use in jewelry and as a monetary unit, gold is also a common element in many products that are important to our every day lives.
Gold is used in everything from heart surgeries, filters to limit polution, on space ships, and in our cell phones!
At the end of 2001, it is estimated that all the gold ever mined amounts to about 145,000 tons.
To give you an idea of how much gold this actually is, think about it this way: if all of this were made into a thin wire with a diameter of 5 microns (a micron is one-millionth of a meter), then all the gold would stretch around the world about 7.2 million times! Amazing!
Source courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold, http://www.gold.org
