[PHONE RINGING]
Hi it's Doug.
I've got some coins here.
I collect coins.
You probably know this one, it's
a one cent coin, it's a penny.
And this one here is a $20 coin.
Different coins are made
out of different metals.
This one is made out of silver.
This one is made out of copper.
Some one named Kadielynn has a
question for us about metals.
Let's give her a call now.
[PHONE RINGING]
Hi Doug.
Hi Kadielynn.
I was wondering where
does metal come from?
That's a great question.
Have you ever thought about
where metal comes from?
It's interesting, think about
it, metal is all around us.
It's in chairs, and desks, and
buildings, and cars, and buses,
and it's in coins.
But where does metal come from?
Do you have any ideas?
Now'd be a good time
to pause the video
if you want to stop and discuss
OK, you ready?
So where does metal come from?
You might have some idea that
metal comes from the Earth.
That's true but what does
that mean, like are there
chunks of metal in the ground?
Is that what these
machines are digging out?
Well for some metals
the answer is yes.
Gold is an example of
a metal that can just
be found in the ground.
Here you can see someone
panning for gold in a river.
They're sifting through
the sand in the river
and finding little
pieces of gold.
Now just finding chunks
of metal like this,
pure metal from the
ground, is really rare.
It's very uncommon.
Most metals cannot be found
the way that gold can--
just waiting in the ground--
and that's because
most metal is hidden.
It's hidden inside of rocks.
And not just any
rocks, metal can only
be found in special
kinds of rocks,
like the ones you see here.
Each of these rocks
is called an ore.
These red ones are iron ore.
They contain the metal iron.
The blue green ones,
they're copper ore.
They contain copper metal.
Here's a close up view
of some copper ore.
Now when I say that
ore contains metal,
you might think that means
that if we crack the rock open
we'll find metal inside of
it, but it doesn't quite
work like that.
You can keep breaking
this copper ore up
into smaller and smaller pieces.
You're never going to
find copper in there.
That's because the metal is
actually part of the ore.
It's in the whole rock
all throughout it.
It's almost like the metal is
hiding right in front of you.
And in order to get
the metal out of it
the ore has to be transformed
by heat, lots of heat.
You have to put
the ore in an oven.
Now you wouldn't be
able to do this at home
with the oven in your kitchen,
because your oven doesn't
get nearly hot enough.
We're talking about heating
up to thousands of degrees.
In order to get
metal out of ore,
you have to put the ore in a
special furnace, a type of oven
that can get thousands
of degrees hot.
It gets so hot that the
metal becomes a liquid
and separates from the rock.
You can see here it's
so hot it's glowing.
It looks like lava.
The people who do this work
have to wear special clothes
to protect them from the heat.
So ore is changed.
It's transformed into metal
by heating it in a furnace.
Then once the metal
is in its liquid form
it can be poured out
into different shapes
to make everything from bolts
and paperclips, to car parts.
That's all for this
week's question.
Thanks Kadielynn for asking it.
Now for the next episode I
reached into my question jar
and found three questions
submitted to me that I'm
thinking about answering.
When this video's done playing
you'll get to vote on one.
You can choose from why is
dirt brown, why do we need air,
or why do we call
it the North Pole?
So submit your vote
when the video's over.
I want to hear from
all of you watching.
There are mysteries
all around us.
Stay curious and
see you next week.
