Emma - How is metal made?
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Whether you're assembling airplanes or building batteries, you need metals—and lots of them. The snag is that metals generally don't occur in the ground in exactly the way that we'd like to find them, in their pure form and in deposits large enough to make it worth our while to extract them. Often they're buried in rock with deposits of other metals and they exist not as pure elements but oxides (metals fused with oxygen atoms) and other compounds. Producing large quantities of a metal like iron, aluminum, or copper therefore involves two distinct operations: extracting an ore (a deposit consisting usually of a huge amount of useless rock and smaller amounts of useful metals) from a mine or quarry and then refining the ore to get the metals away from their oxides (or other compounds) into the pure form that we need.
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