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Suppose that you are building a new house. It will take about 90 kg (198 pounds) of copper to do the electrical wiring. In order to get the copper in the first place, someone needs to mine solid rock that contains copper, extract the copper minerals, throw away the waste rock, and smelt the copper minerals to produce copper metal. Rocks mined for copper typically contain only very small percentages of copper-about 0.7% in the case of most of the big porphyry copper deposits of the world. How much rock would someone have to mine in order to extract enough copper to wire your new house?
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