The phrase "a precious material" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a valuable or highly sought-after substance, often in contexts related to jewelry, art, or manufacturing.
Example: "Gold is considered a precious material due to its rarity and desirability in various applications."
Alternatives: "a valuable substance" or "a treasured resource."
"Bronze has a history of being a precious material," she said.
For its owner, however, the unadorned shell didn't show: the shell, like its neighbors made of stones of sardonyx and jasper, was a precious material without natural glamour.
I can imagine that in 50 years' time our children will be saying 'I can't believe they used such a precious material to fill balloons,'" said Peter Wothers of Cambridge University, who gave the 2012 Royal Institution Christmas lectures.
"Your dignity should not be an issue: I will guard it like a precious material in my heart even when thoughtless jokes come out of my mouth," Mr. Berlusconi wrote then.
The most impressive of the three versions shown here is one lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is printed on vellum, a precious material earlier used for illuminated manuscripts.
According to Pliny the Elder, the difficulties to extract the dye and its exorbitant price justify its status as a precious material [11].
One difference between westerns and comic-book movies is that the older genre always represented a finite source of precious material.
It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of certain Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten.
In fact, PCR approaches have been largely abandoned in the ancient DNA field due to the waste of precious material, a high contamination risk, and their low efficiency (Knapp & Hofreiter, Genes 1, 227-43 [2010]; Stoneking & Krause, Nat. Rev. Genet 12, 603-14 [2011]).
He is aghast at the thought of putting such precious material in a bathroom.
And he shared his precious material with a young biotechnology company, which figured out how to produce larger amounts of the protein using genetic engineering.
