There are six main properties of minerals, with this you can identify them. These are: luster, hardness, streak, cleavage or fracture, density and color. The properties, that are more useful to identify a mineral is the streak and luster. The property that is not really useful is color, beacuse many minerals can show a color thats not its real color.
As I was saying, an important property in mierals is the luster."Luster is the term used to describe how light is reflected from a minerals surface. " There are eight types of luster: waxy, earthy, pearly, silky, greasy, metallic, submetallic- dull and glassy. Another property thats really useful to identify a mineral is hardness. You can test the minerals hardness with the mohs hardness scale that goes form that softest mineral being talc, to the hardest being diamond. The other way is making the field test were you scratch a mineral with different things such as fingernail, that is number one on the mohs scale, then a copper penny can scratchit, that would be number three, after this comes a steel knife that would be number four, then it can be scratched by glass, that would be number 6, and then the other minerals in the mohs scale can scratch the ones that come before.
Each mineral has a characteristic: density. "Density is the mass in a given space, or mass per unit volume."Density never changes, even if you break the rock in many little pieces the density would be the same. For example, if you take galena and quartz of the same size, you could could see galena is much denser by holding it, even thoughis the same size, and even if quartz is bigger, galena would be denser. Streak is the powder the mineral lifes. You can find the streak by having a piece of black marble if its a light mineral, or a piece of wuite marble if is a dark mineral. Then you take the mineral and scratch it against the marble, and the powder ir left, is the color.
These are some properties of minerals that are useful to identify them.
As I was saying, an important property in mierals is the luster."Luster is the term used to describe how light is reflected from a minerals surface. " There are eight types of luster: waxy, earthy, pearly, silky, greasy, metallic, submetallic- dull and glassy. Another property thats really useful to identify a mineral is hardness. You can test the minerals hardness with the mohs hardness scale that goes form that softest mineral being talc, to the hardest being diamond. The other way is making the field test were you scratch a mineral with different things such as fingernail, that is number one on the mohs scale, then a copper penny can scratchit, that would be number three, after this comes a steel knife that would be number four, then it can be scratched by glass, that would be number 6, and then the other minerals in the mohs scale can scratch the ones that come before.
Each mineral has a characteristic: density. "Density is the mass in a given space, or mass per unit volume."Density never changes, even if you break the rock in many little pieces the density would be the same. For example, if you take galena and quartz of the same size, you could could see galena is much denser by holding it, even thoughis the same size, and even if quartz is bigger, galena would be denser. Streak is the powder the mineral lifes. You can find the streak by having a piece of black marble if its a light mineral, or a piece of wuite marble if is a dark mineral. Then you take the mineral and scratch it against the marble, and the powder ir left, is the color.
These are some properties of minerals that are useful to identify them.
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