What Is Density?
How to Measure Gold’s Density
To find out how dense gold is, we need two things:
- How much gold there is, this is its
mass, like weighing it on a scale. - How big the gold is, this is its
volume, like figuring out how much space it takes up.
Let’s say you have a piece of gold. You put it on a scale and find its mass, maybe it weighs 100 grams. Then, you drop it into water and see how much water it pushes aside, that tells you the volume.
Once we know both numbers, we divide the mass by the volume to get density, just like dividing the number of toys by the size of the box! Gold is super heavy for its size, like how a marble feels heavier than a pebble even though they’re both small.
Examples
- Filling a cup with water and dropping in a gold ring to measure displacement
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See also
- How Does Gold, which has a density of 19.32 g/cm^3 Work?
- Does hot water freeze faster than cold water?
- Can You Eat Glass?
- A History of Gold as a Currency: Did You Know?
- Gold isn’t rare. So why is it valuable?