KS1 - The building blocks of our world

In the game Minecraft, the world is made up of single blocks, each of a different type.     

All the building blocks in Minecraft

This, is actually pretty close to the real world, except in the real world, the building blocks are much, much smaller and called Atoms.  There are more than 100 different atoms which combine to make elements (Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen etc).  These are made up of something even smaller.

In fact, everything is made of just three sub atomic particles.

Protons, Neutrons and Electrons

Here are the smallest three elements.

  1. 1 - Hydrogen

  2. 2 - Helium

  3. 3 - Lithium

As another example, we could look at Gold.  Many trillions of gold atoms bond together to make solid gold.  If we reduce gold right down to the atomic level we would find Gold Atoms.

  1. Gold Bar

  2. Gold Dust

  3. Tiny Gold Atom

How many atoms of gold are in 1g of gold?

How many atoms of gold are there in 1g of pure gold dust ? 

30,573,183,730,000,000,000 = 30.573 Billion-Billion Atoms of Gold in 1 gram.

In chemistry, gold is chemical element 79.

It has 79 Protons, 79 Electrons and 118 Neutrons.

Its symbol is Au, from the Latin word for gold, Aurum.

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