Coin & Bullion Knowledge Check
Check yourself
A trivia-style check on bullion and coin-collecting basics, covering purity, grading and common terms. It shows which words and ideas you already know and which are still new, before you read further about the metals.
Key points
- It checks purity, such as the standard fineness of an American Silver Eagle and how it differs from sterling.
- It checks the term junk silver, which describes pre-1965 American dimes, quarters and half dollars made of ninety percent silver.
- It checks how the one-to-seventy coin grading scale works and what the top grade means.
- It checks units and abbreviations, such as the troy ounce, which is not the same as a kitchen-scale ounce, and the letters AGE, which stand for American Gold Eagle.
- It checks the standard weight of a London Good Delivery gold bar and the names of the major third-party coin grading services.
- It asks what a numismatist collects beyond the weight of the metal, which is the difference between metal value and collector value.