Chapter Questions
What properties distinguish minerals from other substances?
Explain why oil and coal are not minerals.
What does the chemical formula for quartz, $\mathrm{SiO}_{2}$, tell you about its chemical composition? What does $$\mathrm{KAlSi}_{3} \mathrm{O}_{8}$$ tell you about orthoclase feldspar?
What is an atom? An ion? A cation? An anion? An anionic group? What role does each play in minerals?
Every mineral has a crystalline structure. What does this mean?
What are the factors that control the shape of a well-formed crystal?
What is a crystal face?
What conditions allow minerals to grow well-formed crystals? What conditions prevent their growth?
List and explain the physical properties of minerals that are most useful for identification.
Why do some minerals have cleavage whereas others do not? Why do some minerals have more than one direction of cleavage planes?
Why is color often an unreliable property for mineral identification?
List the rock-forming minerals. Why are they called rock-forming? Which are silicates? Why are so many of them silicates?
Draw a three-dimensional view of a single silicate tetrahedron. Draw the five arrangements of tetrahedron found in the rock-forming silicate minerals. How many oxygen ions are shared between adjacent tetrahedron in each of the five configurations?
Make a table with two columns. List the basic silicate structures in the left column. In the right column, list one or more examples of rock-forming minerals for each structure.
Explain how mining can release harmful or poisonous materials from rocks that were benign in their natural environment.