Gold, for ages, has represented wealth. Even thousands of years ago, gold was considered precious and kept care fully as one’s property. It remains expensive even today because it is scarce, is very useful, and can be kept and used in the form of ornaments or coins etc. which can be converted back into a good amount of money anywhere in the world.
Gold remains very dear to the human kind because of its many remarkable properties. It is representative of the ‘noble metals’, that is the metals which do not change on the surface, don’t get rusted, retain their luster, and do not dissolve in ordinary acids or alkalies.
Gold is one of the heaviest elements found on earth. Pure gold is very soft and pliant. It is so easy to hammer and shape it that less than one gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet of nearly two square meters.
A gold nugget not larger than a match head can be drawn out into a wire more than three kilometers long. To make jewellery, pure gold is made harder by adding a small quantity of copper, silver, nickel, etc.
Gold is used for technical purposes and scientific experiments also. In electronics, it is used for the transistors and diodes. It is also used in dental work. Geologists believe that the earth’s crust alone contains about hundred thousand million tons of gold, and about ten thousand million tonnes of it is present in the oceans. Only part of this has been taken out from the earth by man. It is expensive and difficult to get it from its sources, and this keeps the price high and tempts man to grab more and more of it.