• Question: What is the equivalent weight of gold and silver put together?

    Asked by ogi bogi dogi to Angus on 24 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Angus Cook

      Angus Cook answered on 24 Jun 2016:


      Tough question, it really depends on how much of each.

      Lets talk in amounts that are easy to think about, like a small coke bottle (the 500 ml ones you can get in a vending machine).

      Gold is actually really quite dense (denser than lead!) If you had the same amount of gold and steel, the gold would weigh TWICE as much as the steel!
      (If you ever see a robbery movie where they’re throwing around gold bricks, you can call them out as fake and be the envy of all your friends (maybe not that last bit…). Really it’d take someone both hands to carry a gold brick.)

      So a small coke bottle of gold would weigh about 10 kg (or the same as 10 L of water), imagine trying to carry 5 x 2L coke bottles back from the shops!).

      A small coke bottle of silver would weigh about 5 kg, half that of the gold.

      So if you had some mix of the gold and the silver in the coke bottle, it would weigh between 5 kg (pure silver) and 10 kg (pure gold).

      Incidentally, a bottle full of gold would be worth about £300,000, wheras a bottle of silver would be worth about £2,000, so if you have the choice hang on to the gold!

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