Hello everyone!

As you are reading this article here, it is confirmed that you are interested in gold investment. So here is something that might give you an idea about basics of investment in gold and basics of this field.

We all know that prices of gold in the years of our knowledge have never came down and it's increment rate is much higher than even real estates. It is said that "Gold never Stops." and it true also, as the market itself is the witness of growth of gold.

Here in this article i will be discussing some basic things about gold, and in few subsequent articles i will elaborate more on investment in gold.

So first of all we start with knowing gold better. We all know about gold but there are variety of gold available and their quality as well as cost differs from each other very much. Gold that we see in different places are not the same. You can get more information about gold here at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold.

Thought you will find so much information about gold on wikipedia, i would like to mention few things here itself as these facts are very important to know and understand before one starts investment in gold..

1. Completely pure gold is very soft material that can be scratched with the help of finger nails, and even can be shaped using hammer into different shapes. So using this kind of gold one needs to be very careful as it can gather ding and can be scratched resulting in the reduced value like in the case of gold coin.

2. As mentioned in the above point that pure gold is very soft, to improve its handling quality and durability, some alloys are mixed into the gold. Thus the gold formed this way becomes much harder and easier to handle on a regular basis. Adding alloy in the pure gold causes the purity to go down and its value as well falls down. Thus there was a need to quantify and calculate this drop in purity. This is done by "Karat", the measurement unit of gold purity.

3. The number on the karat scale is directly related with the purity of the gold by weight. The highest number on the karat scale is 24, which is called 24K. This is completely pure gold that doesn't have any mixture. !00% pure gold is just in theory, practically 100% pure gold doesn't exist, gold is considered when it's purity is more than 99.95%. Since the relation between purity of gold and number on the karat scale is linear, 18k gold has 75% pure gold and 25% alloy, 12k gold has 50% pure gold and 50% alloy. In the similar manner 6k gold has 75% alloy and 25% pure gold.

Very popular karat numbers for gold are given below with their corresponding purity percentages:

* 24k gold contains 99.95%(or more) gold by weight.

* 22k gold contains 91.67% gold by weight.

* 20k gold contains 75.00% gold by weight.

* 14k gold contains 58.33% gold by weight.

Generally the jeweleries sold in the market are 14k and this they contain only 58.33 percent gold only, rest is the alloy mixed into it. The metals that are mixed into gold are Copper, zinc, silver, iron, aluminium, platinum and natural bismuth. Most commonly used metal is copper as its color is very similar to gold. Other metals are added depending upon which color of gold you want, as adding metals causes the difference in the color of gold.

So here i stop with gold basics. In the subsequent articles i will try to elaborate investment in gold.

Till then, have a golden life. Good bye.