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- Price, Properties, and Uses of Gold
- Gold is used in money, jewelry, electronics, dentistry, the aerospace industry, the arts, the medical field, and the chemical field
- Since 1980, the price of gold ranges from $320 to $460 dollars per troy ounce.
- Gold is a noble metal since it does not oxidize under normal conditions
- Element Number 79 on the periodic table with symbol Au (from the Latin word for gold “aurum”)
- Relatively soft metal with the hardness of a penny
- Most malleable and ductile of the metals
- Color= sun yellow (Can be silver-white to green to orange-red when mixed with other elements such as silver, copper, platinum, and nickel
- Density of gold = 19.3 compared to 11.4 for lead.
- Very resistant to weathering
- Found in riverbeds as dust, flakes, grains, or nuggets
- Concentrations of gold in gravel are called “pay streaks”
- Defining and Measuring Gold
- Unit of Measure = troy ounce
- 1 troy ounce =20 pennyweights
- 1 pennyweight = 1.555 grams
- “Bullion” = bars or ingots of unrefined gold
- “Fineness” = gold content in parts per thousand (i.e. gold nugget with fineness of 820 = 820 parts gold/180 parts other metals)
- “Karat” = proportion of solid gold in an alloy based on 24 total parts (i.e. 10K gold has 10 parts gold and 14 parts other metals)
- A Karat is roughly 4.17% pure gold, therefore 24 karats is 100% gold.
- Pure gold is rarely used in Jewelry as it's too soft. It is usually mixed with silver to copper to make a stronger gold alloy.
- Don’t confuse with “carat” which is a unit of weight for gemstones
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