## Step 2 - Reading

#### The history of money

You are going to read a text about the history of money.

On your own

- Read the text and fill in the words.

In your group

- Compare your answers.

Money Money is anything that is commonly accepted by a group of people for the exchange of [1] __________, services, or resources. Every country has its own system of coins and paper money. In the beginning, people bartered, that is, they exchanged things or services for other things or services, i.e., a bag of rice for a bag of beans. However, what happened if you couldn’t agree what something was [2] __________ in exchange of what you had or if you did not want what the other person had. To solve that problem humans developed what is called commodity money. A commodity is a basic item used by almost everyone. In the past, salt, tea, tobacco, cattle and seeds were commodities and [3] __________ were once used as money. However, using commodities as money had other problems. Carrying bags of salt and other commodities was hard, and commodities were difficult to store or were [4] __________. Metals objects were introduced as money around 5000 B.C. By 700 BC, the Lydians became the first in the Western world to make coins. Countries were soon [5] __________ their own series of coins with specific values. Metal was used because it was [6] __________ available, easy to work with and could be recycled. [7] __________ coins were given a certain value, it became easier to compare the cost of items people wanted. Some of the earliest known paper money dates [8] __________ to China, where the issue of paper money became common from about AD 960 onwards. With the introduction of paper [9] __________ and non-precious coinage, commodity money evolved into representative money. This meant that what money itself was made of no longer had to be very [10] __________. Representative money was backed by a government or bank’s promise to exchange it for a certain amount of silver or gold. For example, the old British Pound bill or Pound Sterling was once guaranteed to be redeemable for a pound of sterling silver. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the majority of currencies were based on representative money through the use of the gold [11] __________.