Dale Heather Reynolds, age 10, of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

What is white gold?

Gold, real gold, is golden yellow and it never can be any other color. But it can be smelted with other metals to make metal alloys. This is a good idea, because by itself gold is a soft metal and objects made of pure gold tend to bend out of shape and wear away with hard use. When gold is mixed with a small percentage of silver, we get a hard wearing alloy with all the shining beauty of natural gold.

But when gold is alloyed with certain other metals, it loses its color. When the mixture is three parts gold with one part nickel and zinc, we get a rich looking sil¬very colored metal called white gold. It is a very hard, shiny alloy that looks like platinum. However, it is less heavy and much less expensive than heavy platinum. Jewelers use it as settings for real and synthetic diamonds and other gems that look their best with silvery colored metals.