The discovery of fire allowed us to transform materials in certain rocks into strong, malleable metals. As people learned more about chemistry and fire, a variety of metallic ores were transformed into increasingly useful metals. Copper, gold and silver are not abundant metals but aluminum, iron and calcium are much more abundant. In our lab, we found that copper was more reactive than silver etc. Turn to p. 140.
Reactive metals are more difficult to obtain from their ores than are less reactive metals.
In general, a more reactive metal will release a less reactive metal from its compounds. You can predict whether a reaction will occur.