Q: What's brown, hairy and wears sunglasses?
A Coconut on vacation!
A: Most is now from South Africa and Russia. In one extraction process, gold-bearing rock is crushed and washed over copper plates covered with mercury, dissolving the gold, with the resulting amalgam then scraped off and distilled, says Dr. Joe Schwarcz in "The Fly in the Ointment." About 4 tons of rock is needed to eventually yield 1 ounce of pure gold. The world's greatest total gold reserve is actually in seawater, but it's concentration is so small getting it out is not economically feasible.
Gold's properties make it especially valuable industrially. A thin layer of malleable gold is highly reflective and can be used on windows to save on air- conditioning costs. It is also such an excellent conductor of electricity that it is used extensively in computer circuits. "In fact, a new industry has recently arisen: recovering gold from computer scrap. One ton of computer rubble can yield 2 pounds of gold." PC "pay dirt"!
Send questions to StrangeTrue@compuserve.com.
|
|
