Is it water? No, but admittedly it’s the liquid many people need most and shockingly 5000 children die each day across the world due to drinking unclean water.

Is it crude oil? No it’s not, though a barrel (42 US gallons) of oil isn’t cheap, currently reaching around £40 to £50 (depending on the state of the market). In the UK approximately two million barrels worth of crude oil are used every single day, enough to fill an entire football stadium.

Is it perfume? It’s not perfume, though some fragrances have sold for as much as $215,000, like Clive Christian’s Imperial Majesty. The real reason for that hefty price tag was because the bottle containing the fragrance had a five carat diamond adorning it. On average a 500ml bottle of perfume will cost £50.

Is it printer ink? Amazingly a gallon of printer ink costs around $8000 for inkjet printers! In a lot of places you may hear of printer ink referred to as the new black gold, much like oil used to be and obviously this is not without reason. The average price for a set of ink cartridges for a home use digital printer is about £40, and that’s around just 10ml of ink per colour. For something like a top of the range HP Indigo Digital Press, the ink costs around £120 for a litre refill. There are now more than 5,000 Indigo Digital Press printers in the world and their popularity is down to the high quality printing they produce. Often companies find it much better value for money to outsource their printing needs to a digital print company rather than printing in-house.

So it’s printer ink, right? Actually it isn’t. It’s scorpion venom, which comes in at $38,858,507.46 per gallon. The cost is so great because scorpions are nasty, obviously!