Minerals are the components of various rocks and ores inside and outside the earth's crust, and are a natural unity with certain chemical composition and physical properties. Most minerals are solids, and some are liquids (such as natural mercury and petroleum) or gases (such as carbon dioxide and H2S).

Mineralogists divide all minerals into two types: organic minerals and inorganic minerals. The former is less, mainly hydrocarbons, such as coal for daily cooking and amber for women's cosmetics. Organic compound minerals, such as oil and asphalt, are living animals and plants. Because of long-term geological action, they have lost their original shape and become inanimate products, so they are called organic minerals. The latter is abundant on the earth. As dozens to hundreds of new minerals are discovered every year, according to statistics, there are currently three or four thousand kinds. Many kinds of minerals are inseparable from our daily life, such as pencils used by primary and secondary school students almost every day, and graphite used to make refills is one of them. The salt we use for every meal is also a natural stone salt mineral, which can be said that human beings can't live without minerals all the time.

The chemical composition of organic minerals is hydrocarbons, while the chemical composition of inorganic minerals is more complicated. More than 100 chemical elements in Mendeleev's periodic table can form inorganic minerals. It can be an independent element or a combination of multiple elements. Minerals with independent elements are common. For example, iron can form natural iron minerals, silver can form natural silver minerals, and gold can form natural gold minerals. Thousands of minerals can be formed by combining more than two elements. The simplest elements, such as silicon and oxygen, can form silicon dioxide, and the minerals composed of these two elements can be Yingshi, Shiying and tridymite. Iron and oxygen can form hematite, hematite and magnetite. Hematite and magnetite are the main raw materials for ironmaking. There are many minerals composed of three elements, such as Cu5FeS4 for bornite, CuFeS2 for chalcopyrite and CoAsS for cobalt iron ore. The raw material of the ceramic products we use every day is what we call clay. Its chemical composition is more complicated than that of the above minerals, and it is composed of Al2Si2O5(OH)4. This chemical composition is the name of four minerals (kaolinite, dickite, halloysite and nacrite), but its physical properties are different, so it is four independent minerals.