Some of these can be answered from the material presented in this lab. Some call

Question

Some of these can be answered from the material presented in this lab. Some call for deeper thinking, and some will require further reading. Note that our rather exact definition of what a mineral is excludes many of the everyday meanings of the word "mineral". For instance, to some a "mineral resource" can be any substance, such as stone, cool, petroleum, gravel, salt, or diamond, that is extracted from the ground and sold as a commodity. To a nutritionist, minerals are the inorganic elements found in foods, like iron and potassium and calcium, that are essential to life. In popular speech, any substance that is neither "animal" nor "vegetable" is "mineral". Discuss why any of these definitions do not necessarily meet the requirements of the definition used by geologists. Friedrich Mohs has already gotten all the glory, but you can make up your own Hardness Scale, using the minerals in your collection, and name it after yourself. Remember that once you establish the hardness of a material, you can use It as a standard to test other materials. You have 19 different minerals. Is it feasible to have a scale of 1 -19? Or do you have to settle for a lesser number? Besides its hardness, what other property makes quartz valuable as an abrasive? Why? Physical Properties of Minerals

Explanation / Answer

4.

In geology, we define mineral as – A naturally occurring, inorganic, solid, crystalline substance which has a fixed structure and chemical composition which can be fixed or may vary within certain defined limits.

A mineral resource such as coal, petroleum, stone are not minerals but are aggregates or derivatives of many minerals and other substances.

In nutrition, the minerals are defined as inorganic elements that are required for our body such as Iron and potassium, calcium etc. These are elements in their purest form and do not have a particular fixed structure as we take these elements as dissolved in foods and solvents. Hence we cannot accommodate these into the geological definition of a mineral.

Animal and vegetable are not minerals in general speech as minerals in that context are only those that can be mined or extracted. But yet there exists mineral formation inside certain animals in micro-scales, but the biological intervention prevents it from being a complete inorganic substance. Hence it fails to be considered as a geological mineral.

Hence the above discussed definitions don’t necessarily meet the requirements of the definition used by geologists.

5.

When Mohs came up with 10 minerals of hardness, he had to strike all possible combinations of minerals against each other to determine the relative hardness hence forming a sequence of hardness scale minerals. The number of combinations he had to compare were 45. When we have 19 different minerals the number of times you have to compare each combination, the number of combinations required to be checked for relative hardness would be 171. Which would be almost 4 times the number of what Mohs had done. Hence, I would choose a lesser number to reduce the number of relative comparisons I would be required to perform to establish a hardness scale.

6.

A feature of quartz that makes it a good abrasive is its crystal structure. As quartz crystal breaks, it cleaves along a curve (called conchoidal fracture). This leaves sharp edges on one side of the fracture that assist in grinding. During abrasive processes, the quartz will break into fragments and the fragments also have sharper edges that in turn help with the abrasion.

All the best :)

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