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Gold

Precious metal

Gold (Indo-Germanic ghel shiny, yellow) is the chemical element with the abbreviation «Au» (Aurum – from «aurora», dawn). The technical symbol for gold, a circle with a dot in the center, is identical with the sign of astronomers for the sun.

On gold - which on behalf of its softness is absolutely peaceful, because unsuitable as a weapon metal - man learned for the first time the processing of metal, probably even before the Stone Age. Due to its rarity and its striking color he stylized it into a symbol of the sun, of life and of happiness. In almost all cultures the word for gold is derived either of the color yellow or directly of the name for the sun.

Gold is very evenly distributed on the earth the entire 15 kilometers “thin” crust contains an average accumulation of 3 to 5 mg per ton. That adds up to about 30 billion tons of gold. A quarter of it is dissolved in seawater. From this unimaginable amount of the precious metal, which remains unattainable though for the most part, only 100,000 tons were recovered and processed in the last 5,000 years. This results, purely arithmetically, in the famous cube of pure gold, about 20 meters long, 20 meters wide and 20 meters high.

In the jewelry sector gold is almost never processed in its pure form because of its softness. Classic gold alloys for jewelery belonging to the ternary system gold-silver-copper. These compositions also exist in natural resources. The color spectrum of gold alloys ranges from saturated yellow to bright green to salmon pink to silver white …

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