About Gold and Gold Education

At the end of 2006, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 158,000 tonnes. [1]

This can be represented by a cube with an edge length of just 20.2 meters.

Modern industrial uses include dentistry and electronic, where gold has traditionally found use because of its good resistance to oxidative corrosion and excellent quality as a conductor of electricity.

Chemically, gold is a transition metal and can form trivalent and univalent cations upon solvation.

At STP it is attacked by aqua regia (a mixture of acids), forming chloroauric acid and by alkaline solutions of cyanide but not by single acids such as hydrochloric, nitric or sulfuric acids. Gold dissolves in mercury, forming amalgam alloys, but does not react with it. Since gold is insoluble in nitric acid which will dissolve silver and base metals, this is exploited as the basis of the gold refining technique known as "inquartation and parting". Nitric acid has long been used to confirm the presence of gold in items, and this is the origin of the colloquial term "acid test", referring to a gold standard test for genuine value.