Look around you. What objects do you see that are made of metal? The doorknob may be made of iron or brass. Your fork and spoon may be made of steel or silver. The ring on your mum’s or dad’s finger may be made of gold or silver. Metals are all around us. But where do they come from?
You can’t dig metal out of the ground. But the ore, or mineral, that metal comes from is found underground. Ore is made of metal joined with rocks. Ore is metal in its raw form.
To get metals out of the ground, miners first dig out the ore. The ore is taken to a factory where heat is used to separate the metal from the ore. This process is called smelting. The ores are dumped into a blast furnace and heated to over 1600 °C. The metals in the ores melt and pure liquid metal sinks to the bottom. The rest of the ore is waste material called slag.
The liquid metal is poured into moulds until it hardens. The bars of hardened metal are called ingots.
The ingots are ready to be rolled, pressed, or moulded into the shapes of the things we use.
Picture Credit : Google
