as precious as gold

Grammar usage guide and real-world examples

SPORTSTHURSDAY, PAGE D4 Big Tires, Big Prices Because of a scarcity, giant tires that go on large dump trucks are selling for $40,000 each, making them almost as precious as gold and silver.

Ms. Cohen's "Sajarra," danced to music by Shlomo Bar, evoked the cultural clashes and harshness of life in the desert, where fire-building twigs are as precious as gold.

A 9-year-old boy, his father and his uncle travel by camel hundreds of miles across the Sahara from their home in Niger in search of salt, a commodity once as precious as gold.

His scheme was to pump salt water from Salins-les-Bains to Arc-et-Senans, where enormous fires stoked by timber from the nearby forest of Chaux would change brine into salt, at the time a substance almost as precious as gold.

To travel along tracks that twist and vanish as soon as they are found, and through seemingly dead-end gullies into the shadow of jagged-edged Jebel Dukhan is to sense a little of the arduous lives of the miners of the Roman era, when water was nearly as precious as gold.

As rare and as precious as ciguapas.

Napoleon III quickly realized its potential for military and industrial uses, while his wife, Empress Eugénie, embraced the jewelry, then as rare and precious as gold.

Shoppers for the high-end merchandise displayed in the front of the store -- diamonds and other precious stones, as well as gold -- don't have to use the pagers.

Back then, silver was rare and precious, worth almost as much as gold.

In 2,000BC Egyptian glass beads were considered as valuable as gold and semi-precious gems, and were traded widely.

In 1996 Mr. Khloponin began running Norilsk, which controls vast deposits of copper, nickel and palladium, a precious metal more than twice as valuable as gold.