With your lab partner, design an easy to follow procedure. To earn extra money w

Question

With your lab partner, design an easy to follow procedure. To earn extra money while in college, you take a job at a local consignment shop that regularly buys and sells jewelry from customers. The owner wants to find a fast way of telling whether a piece of jewelry is pure gold, 14 ct, or 22 ct. without damaging the jewelry. Knowing that density can be used to identify metals, you look up the values for different types of gold. Your task: design a way to calculate the density of a "gold" chain without damaging the it. In the shop, you find a basic chemistry set that contains: a balance, a large graduated cylinder, a beaker, a ruler, aqua regia (a caustic chemical that dissolves gold, d = 1.24 g/mL), table salt, and metal file.

Explanation / Answer

First weigh the chain using the balance and note it down in Kg

Now fill water in the graduated cylinder (don't fill it completely with water) and mark the volume in the gradated cylinder if it is mL or L and note it down.

Next step immerse the gold in the cylinder so that the water level rises . Mark the new reading and find the difference between old reading from cylinder and the new reading. which will give the volume of the chain according to archimedes principle.

Archimedes principle states that whenever a solid is immersed in a liquid the volume of liquid displaced is equal to volume the solid body immersed in liquid.

So now we have both the weight and volume of the gold chain so if we divide the weight of chain by its volume then we will get the density of chain. from that we can say which type of gold it is.

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