engl_posob / В. И. Комиссарук ГЭФ 3-5 курс / text 4c

Exercise 6. Explain and comment the following proverbs. Try to find Russian equivalents.

Money is the root of all evil.

Money makes money.

Time is money.

Take the care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.

A penny saved is a penny gained.

Who will not keep a penny never shall have any.

Money spent on brain is never spent in vain.

Text 4C.

Read the text and point out:

1. what objects did the people use in their history as money;

2. in what countries of the world the use of money can be traced?

3. Who could issue money or objects replacing them in human history?

The History of Money

Do you know that thousands of years ago money had smell? In the days, of primitive man, people used things to wear or to eat as money. Cattle, tobacco grains, skins, salt, beads were used as money. This variety of money was eventually replaced by pieces of metal, particularly gold of silver.

The first coins may have been during the 600's B.C. in Lydia, a county in what is now Turkey. The coins were bean shaped lumps of electrum, a natural mixture of gold and silver. The coins had a stamped design to show that he King of Lydia guaranteed them to be of uniform value. The designs saved people the trouble of weighing each coin to determine its value. Traders accepted these coins instead of cattle, cloth, gold dust, or their goods as a medium of exchange.

Other people around the Mediterranean Sea imitated the Lydians, and gradually the use of coins became widespread. In many cases these coins merely represented some other articles which could not easily be used for money. Thus many coins were stamped with the picture of the object they represented, such a cow.

The greater convenience of metal money led to the use of copper and other metals for coins of small value Early coins had no modem safeguards in design, such as milled edges to prevent tiny bits of metal from being chipped and stolen without being readily noticed. Thus it often happened that coins would lose some of their value because this metal was taken from them.

The development of paper money began in China, probably the AD. 600's. The Italian trader Marco Polo traveled to China in the 1200's and was amazed to see the Chinese using paper money instead of coins.

When the Roman Empire was at its height, standard coins and paper money in the form of letters of credit made trade nearly as easy as it is today. In the later Roman period most sources of gold became practically exhausted, and precious metals were taken out of circulation. As a result, coins were debased, their value went down, and the prices of goods and services went up, along with tax rates.

During the Middle Ages in Europe the coining privilege was owned by numbers of feudal lords resulting in a land flooded with a variety of coins. Most of these coins were of doubtful value except in districts

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