long time ago, before there was any money (coins or paper money), people got the things that they needed by trading or exchanging. Salt was one of the first items used as a valuable to exchange for other items. Later, some of the common things that were used for exchange were tea leaves, shells, feathers, animal teeth, tobacco, and blankets. Around 3000 B.C. (about 5,000 years ago), barley, a type of grain, was used for exchange. Here is a picture of barley:

The world's first metal money was developed by the Sumerians who melted silver into small bars all weighing the same. This was around 1000 B.C. (about 3,000 years ago). About 700 B.C. (about 2,700 years ago), people started using coins as official money.

About sixty years later, around 640 B.C., people in the ancient kingdom of Lydia (which was in Turkey) created special coins called staters guaranteed to be of an exact weight and purity. They were made of gold and silver called electrum and stamped with a lion's head. Here are two examples of staters:

Later, other empires such as Greece, Persia, and Rome adopted the concept of coins and started developing their own in many different shapes and of different metals.

Around the year 1000 (1,000 years ago), the Chinese started using paper money. The Europeans discovered this thanks to Marco Polo¹ who went to China in 1295. The Chinese had different values for the paper notes which were made and guaranteed by the Chinese government. Here is a picture of early Chinese paper money:

It took until 1661 (about 340 years ago) for Sweden to become the first European country to make money made of paper.

Until 1850, the Spanish dollar was the coin most widely used throughout the world.

Now we can tell the story of money in the United States. One of the first coins made in colonial America was the Pine Tree Shilling, made in Boston, Massachusetts in 1652. These pictures show the front and back of a Pine Tree Shilling:

After the American revolution in 1776, all of the colonies began to make their own money as coins and paper bills. In 1787, the Congress established a single official currency for all the colonies. A mint (a factory where money is made) was started in Philadelphia in 1792 to make gold, silver, and copper coins. Around this time, native Americans used beads made into wampum belts for money. This picture shows a beaded wampum belt:

Adding Money Amounts

Amounts of money may be written in several different ways. Cents may be written with the ¢ sign and dollars can be written with the dollar sign ($). Adding money that is expressed in these forms just involves adding the amounts and placing the proper sign on the answer.

Often money is written as a decimal with dollars to the left of the decimal point and cents to the right of the decimal point. Twenty-three dollars and eighty-seven cents is written $23.87.

Decimal money amounts are added the same way that decimals are added. Remember to put the $ sign before the answer.

Adding Decimals is just like adding other numbers.

Always line up the decimal points when adding decimals.

Remember to put the decimal point in the proper place in your answer.

MONEY TALKS

The pay of colleges' chief financial officers has grown faster than that of other college leaders, a Chronicle survey shows.
Margaret Cass Ferber, vice president for finance and treasurer at Nazareth College of Rochester, says working in higher-education finance "can offer a quality of life often not found in private industry." (Photograph by Forest McMullin, Black Star)

The Money Program teaches you how to use coins and bills when you pay for something. The program asks you for a specific amount of money. You drag and drop different coins and bills into a blue box until it contains the correct amount. When you are done, you ask the program to check your answer. The program lets you know if your answer is correct.

The Money Program looks like this:

This is our first Spring Report which charts a national numismatic experience including educational outreach, increased accessibility for members, opportunities to impact anyone interested in collecting, and offering two new museums to provide exposure for the historical, cultural and artistic value of the World of Money!

Money is any good or tokens that functions as a medium of exchange that is socially and legally accepted in payment for goods and services and in settlement of debts. Money also serves as a standard of value for measuring the relative worth of different goods and services. Some authors explicitly require money to be a standard of deferred payment.^[1] Money is central to the study of economics and forms its most cogent link to finance.

In common usage, money refers more specifically to currency, particularly the many circulating currencies with legal tender status conferred by a national state; deposit accounts denominated in such currencies are also considered part of the money supply, although these characteristics are historically comparatively recent. Money may also serve as a means of rationing access to scarce resources and as a quantitative measure that provides a common standard for the comparison and valuation of quality as well as quantity, such as in the valuation of real estate or artistic works.

The use of money provides an easier alternative to barter, which is considered in a modern, complex economy to be inefficient because it requires a coincidence of wants between traders, and an agreement that these needs are of equal value, before a transaction can occur. The efficiency gains through the use of money are thought to encourage trade and the division of labour, in turn increasing productivity and wealth.