All About Gold

All About Gold








[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]What is gold?

Gold
is a rare yellow metal with the designated symbol AU, which is short
for the Latin word 'Aurum' and which means literally, "Glowing Dawn".
The word gold, however, comes from the Indo-European root word and means
simply, yellow.

Gold has a number of properties useful to man
apart from it’s beauty and strange attractiveness for jewellery and
coinage. It is an excellent conductor of electricity and is resistant to
corrosion, not reacting to oxygen or water. It does not tarnish and
does not cause reactions on skin for the vast majority of people. It has
a melting point of 1064 degrees, a boiling point of 2808 centigrade and
is a soft metal and very malleable compared to most metals.

Karat Gold
Gold
is measured in karats. These karats are rather different to the ones
Bugs Bunny enjoys. A Karat is a unit of weight which was based on the
carob seed or bean used by merchants in the middle east hundreds of
years ago. The Carob seed is from the carob Tree and the Karat was used
as a measure of the purity of gold. Gold is also measured in terms of
fineness which is to say, parts per thousand. 24 Karat gold is
considered to be 999.999 parts per thousand on the basis that there can
never be a total and absolute purity of gold. 18 Karat is 18/24th or 750
parts per thousand, the other 250 parts being made up, usually, of
copper, silver, zinc or bronze.

How much gold is there in the world?
Well,
at the end of 2001, it is estimated that all the gold ever mined
amounts to about 145,000 tonnes. Of course that would have increased by
now but even so it is a lot of gold.

Perhaps that is not all
there is to know about gold but it is a few interesting facts about the
metal that we all cherish so dearly.