subject: 12 Interesting Facts About Gold [print this page] Gold is one of the most valuable materials in the world. It is generally traded in units of measure called troy ounces. There are about 31 grams per troy ounce; an average wedding ring weighs about 6 grams. If all the mined gold in the world was put together, it would from a cube roughly 25 meters or 82 feet on a side. Therefore if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument! Here are 12 facts about gold that you may well not know of:
Inactive: Gold is inactive chemically and is not affected by air, heat, moisture and ordinary solvents. Therefore it does not tarnish like silver does.
Sunlight: Gold can be hammered so thin that sunlight can shine through it.
Astronauts: Gold is used in window glass and astronaut helmets to reflect infrared rays while allowing sunlight to pass through, and at the same time keeping it cool.
Banned Ownership: The United States government banned private ownership of gold, which lasted 41 years; then lifted it on December 31, 1974.
Governments: They fear gold because it competes with their own paper currency as a viable and preferred means of exchange and a store of value.
Rarity: A one-ounce gold nugget is more rare to find than a five-carat diamond
Weight: Gold is so heavy that one cubic foot of it weighs half a ton. It is six to seven times heavier than other materials that equal its size
Wire: A single ounce of gold can be drawn into a wire 60 miles long
Piles of gold: Gold can be hammered into sheets so thin that a pile of them an inch high would contain more than 200,000 separate sheets
Sea Water: In every cubic mile of sea water there is 25 tons of gold! That's a total of about 10 billion tons of gold in the oceans. However, there is no known way to economically recover it.
Nuclear reaction: Gold can be transmitted from platinum by nuclear reaction. But, because of the rarity of platinum, it is far too costly.
South Africa: Is the largest producing gold country in the world today
