Gold is a precious chemical element
Gold, like silver, platinum and other precious metals is a natural chemical element, which means it cannot be manufactured. Gold's chemical symbol is Au, which is short for the Latin word for gold, 'Aurum' (meaning 'Glowing Dawn'). Gold has a melting point of 1064 degrees centigrade and a boiling point of 2808 degrees centigrade. The word 'gold' is derived from the Indo-European root 'yellow'.
Interesting features of gold are that it is an element remarkable for its rarity (gold is extremely rare), density, softness, and its very good electrical conductivity. It is also largely inert, and therefore is almost totally immune to decay, and thus can be stored cheaply for long periods.
Gold is a very dense metal with a density of 19.32 g/cm3 which gives it a very heavy atomic weight of 196.9665 g/atom. In practical terms, this means that a litre carton of gold weighs 19.3 kg, so it's nearly 20 times heavier than water. A one tonne cube of gold would have edges of around 37 centimetres - a bit over a foot. It would store value of well over $12 million in very little space.
It is so distinctively heavy that solid gold offers its own immediate qualitative verification in the hand. Gold's heaviness is also important in that it means large amounts of gold can be stored in relatively small spaces, like bank vaults, in which the same value of gold can be stored in one hundredth of the space which would be required for silver.
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Gold weights and measures
By tradition gold is quoted and traded in troy ounces, these having been adopted by the U.S. Mint for the regulation of coinage in 1828. Unlike 'normal' pounds and ounces, there are 12 troy ounces to the troy pound rather than 16. But a troy pound weighs less than in imperial pound ( 0.82 British/US pounds). In short, a troy ounce is approximately 0.031kg or 31 grams.
The following table gives an approximate conversion between traditional and metric weights:
| Troy ounces | Kilograms | Grams |
| 1 | 0.031104 | 31.104 |
| 12 | Kilograms | 373.25 |
| 32.150 | 0.37325 | 1000 |
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