 Almost all of us depend on pure metals like iron and copper in our daily lives. But these pure metals, they come from rocks like these. And in this video, I am going to show you how to extract pure metals from these rocks. Now the need to know this is because we quite often depend on pure metals in our daily lives. But these pure metals, they generally do not occur in the free state in nature. Meaning iron will not form as a big rock of iron. No, you might find iron as iron oxide in these rocks. Or copper as copper sulphide in these rocks. And you will have to extract iron and copper from these compounds. So first problem is that generally metals occur in combined state and not free state. And why I am writing generally is because there are some metals like gold, silver and platinum. That do occur in the free state. You would find pure gold particles and not gold oxide or gold sulphide. But let's talk about them later. Now the second thing is that in these rocks, you would not only find the metal compound that you are looking for. But along with this, there will be many other impurities. For example, this might have iron oxide which I need. Plus it might have some sand or some mud and soil or some other metal compounds that I want to get rid of. So the second problem is that these rocks will have metal compounds that I need plus some impurities that I want to get rid of. So the first step would be to start with a rock that has more metal compounds. Or it takes us less money or less energy to separate the metal compounds and impurities. I would not want to start with a rock that has less amount of metal compound. Or it takes us more money and more time to separate these two out. The bottom line is that naturally most metals occur as metal compounds in the rocks. These are called minerals. But only from specific minerals, we can profitably extract metal compounds. These minerals are called ores. For example, a rock near your house might have some iron oxide compound. So this is a mineral. But if you cannot profitably extract the iron from it, then it's not an iron ore. Now let's see if we had an ore, how would we extract the pure metal out of it? So these are the steps. First, enrichment of the ores. So over here, we take the ore which is basically a rock and we crush it to pieces. And then we separate the metal compound in these pieces from the impurities. So over here, we have concentrated the metal compounds in one bunch. Therefore, we have enriched our ores. Now next step will be to convert this to metal oxide. See, our final aim is to arrive at the pure metal from this ore, right? Now this metal compound could be in any form. It could be metal oxide, it could be metal carbonate or metal sulphide or something else. Now it turns out it's easier to extract metal from metal oxide. And that's why if this compound is metal carbonate or metal sulphide or something else, then first of all, we convert this to metal oxide. And that's where comes the second step. Metal compounds or the metal compounds are converted to their metal oxide form. Now next step is to extract the metal from this metal oxide. And since we are removing oxygen from this compound, this is called reduction. That's why the third step is called reduction to get the metal. Here we convert metal oxide to metal. Now see, the metal that you have got, it's still not completely pure. It will still have some impurities. And that's where comes the fourth step, refining to get the pure metal. Here we convert the metal to pure metal. Now let's look at each step in a little bit more detail. So the first step is enrichment of ores. Over here, our main objective is to separate the metal compounds from the impurities. So first thing, we break the ore into small small pieces. And then we use certain techniques which are based on the physical and chemical properties of these compounds. And we are able to separate them. For example, if you have an iron ore, then see, after breaking the iron compounds, let's say these are iron oxide, they are going to be magnetic in nature. So if you bring a magnet close over here, it will attract most of the iron compounds. And that's how we can separate the iron compounds from the non-magnetic impurities, right? For example, if you have gold ore, you see gold particles are heavier, are denser compared to the impurities. You can use certain techniques like gravity separation to separate the heavier gold particles from the lighter impurities. By the way, the impurities removed at this stage are called gang. And it has a weird spelling, okay? So just be careful. So this is how we can enrich our ores, meaning we can concentrate the metallic compounds and remove most of the impurities out. Now in later videos, we will be talking about how to convert this metal compound into metal oxide. And then reduce the metal oxide to get the metal. And then refine the metal to get pure metal. Well, for now, let's summarize this video. In this video, we spoke about what are minerals and what are ores? And how are these two things different from each other? We spoke about the steps involved to get pure metal, to extract pure metal from metal ores. And we spoke about the first step that is enrichment of the ore in a little bit detail.