Gold element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides). Gold is resistant to most acids, though it does dissolve in aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, which forms a soluble tetrachloroaurate anion. Gold is insoluble in nitric acid, which dissolves silver and base metals, a property that has long been used to refine gold and to confirm the presence of gold in metallic objects, giving rise to the term "acid test". Gold also dissolves in alkaline solutions of cyanide,
Acid-base extraction pH range. The order of the step is not important and the process can be repeated to increase the separation. However, it is often convenient to have the compound dissolved in the organic phase after the last step, so that the evaporation of the solvent yields the product. The procedure works only for acids and bases with a large difference in solubility between their charged and their uncharged form. The procedure does not work for: Alternatives to acid-base extraction including: Acid-base extraction Acid-base extraction is a procedure using sequential liquid–liquid extractions to purify acids and bases from mixtures based on