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Gold has an atomic number of 79. It is one of many chemical elements. Lot’s of people seek gold. It is a precious metal. One of the things gold is commonly used for is art.

Gold is found in rocks. It is usually found in the form of a nugget or grain. Some of the time you can find gold in the veins of rocks. These veins are spaces inside the rock that contain crystals.

So what are the characteristics of gold? Gold is soft, shiny, and dense. It is the most malleable metal known to man. Malleable meaning it can be hammered into really thin sheets.

Pure gold is gold that doesn’t contain any additives. It is a very bright yellow. It has a very shiny luster to it. This metal doesn’t oxidize in water or air which helps it maintain its yellow color and lustrous shine.

Pure gold is too soft for most things. In order for it to be manageable and useful you need to add metals to it. Copper is a popular metal that is mixed with gold to make it harder. But because of pure gold being mixed with other metals a measurement called the carat (k) was to created to know exactly how much of the substance was pure gold. This helped determine the mixtures value.

Some people were curious in 2006 about how much gold had been mined. They did the research and found tha 158,000 tons of gold had been brought up out of the earth by the end of 2006. That is an amazing amount of gold.

Gold has excellent qualities. Due to this excellence it is used in many modern industrial things. Dentist use gold for its ability to avoid corrosion and resist oxidation. Gold is also a great conductor of electricity and is used in modern electronics.

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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