Q.What are the differences between minerals and ores?

Metals differ enormously in how they occur in nature, and that difference is governed almost entirely by chemical REACTIVITY. Only the LEAST reactive metals -- copper, silver, gold and platinum -- are found in significant amounts in their NATIVE (free, uncombined) state, essentially because they are too unreactive to have combined with the oxygen, sulphur or silicon around them over geological time. Every other metal, including all reactive ones such as the alkali metals, occurs only in a COMBINED state -- as an oxide, sulphide, carbonate, silicate or similar compound.

A MINERAL is any naturally occurring substance, obtained by mining, that contains a metal (free or combined). Most minerals carry only a small, uneconomic percentage of the metal of interest -- iron, for instance, occurs in around 800 different minerals, most of which are not worth mining for iron. An ORE is a mineral that contains the metal in a high enough concentration to be extracted CONVENIENTLY and ECONOMICALLY -- so every ore is a mineral, but not every mineral is an ore, and the distinction is entirely a practical/economic one, not a chemical one. Bauxite (Al2O3.nH2O) is an ore of aluminium because aluminium can be profitably extracted from it, while china clay (kaolinite) is merely a mineral of aluminium, since extraction from it is not commercially viable.

Extracting a metal of interest from its chosen ore always proceeds through three metallurgical processes, always in this order: (i) CONCENTRATION of the ore (removing the gangue -- the nonmetallic rocky/siliceous impurity associated with the ore); (ii) EXTRACTION of the crude metal from the concentrated ore; and (iii) REFINING of the crude metal to obtain the pure metal. A representative list of common metals with their principal ores and chemical formulae -- aluminium/bauxite, iron/haematite or magnetite, copper/copper-pyrites or malachite, zinc/zinc-blende or calamine, lead/galena, tin/cassiterite, and silver/argentite among others -- ties the whole extraction pipeline that follows back to real, named starting materials.