Friday, 11 March 2011

Elementary Assay Of Precious Metals

By Jack Wogan


Once discovered, metals changed human lives forever because of properties like hardness and ductility, which means easy to be shaped. In spite of these properties, metals have still a big weak point: the fact that they rust if they stay too much in open space.

It is common knowledge that metals tend to rust, but not all metals are the same. Some of them, commonly known as precious metals, have no rusting issues, but deposits of such materials are quite rare, unlike those of iron. Examples of these metals are gold, silver or platinum, but the list can go on.

The most precious one, the gold, is also the most famous of them, due to the skills of jewelers of all times all over the world. But many other fields shared the fascination for gold, finding interesting applications in medicine, photography, electronics, automotive or food industry and the list can go on. Although gold allowed people to craft it, for centuries the secret of producing gold in a laboratory remained and it still remains hidden to alchemists and chemists.

Not only poets' imagination was inflamed by the image of gold, also economists try to quantify gold as a valuable currency. For gold was invented a special unit called carat (k), that expresses the purity of gold inside an alloy. Gold, unlike many of its fellow metals, does not share their hardness and this is the reason why it is usually used as alloy with different metals like for instance copper or silver. One of the beauties of these alloys is the fact that due to the partner metal they can have different colors: silver, yellow, red or why not green. The most famous alloy is that of 22k with copper, which is also known is crown gold. Pure gold has 24k, but the most spread gold is that of 18k.

Gold coins were used by medieval sovereigns as currency due to the value and importance of gold. Rarity of this material and its endurance makes their value even greater today, when gold is a currency coded XAU and stored as 24k bullion bars on the stock market. But some countries prefer to stick to the tradition and use 22k bars instead.

Due to events affecting people's lives like for instance wars or revolutions, economical crisis or natural disasters, or any other events, currencies tend to decrease or increase. Gold, without any exception, is doing the same thing, except its variations are much lower and its value goes up in time of collapse, meanwhile that specific region currency goes down.

That is the reason for which people will always try to buy Gold Bars during recession times, without considering that these cannot put food on the table or a clothe on your back. If you want a safe and wise approach, better get information from professionals if you want to make Gold Bars' transactions.




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