MONEY
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, summed up the four chief qualities of money some 2,000 years ago. It must be lasting and easy to recognize, to divide, and to carry about. In other words it must be, 'durable, distinct, divisible and portable'. When we think of money today, we picture it either as round, flat pieces of metal which we call coins, or as printed paper notes. But there are still parts of the world today where coins and notes are of no use. They will buy nothing, and a traveller might starve if he had none of the particular local 'money' to exchange for food.
Among isolated peoples, who are not often reached by traders from outside, commerce usually means barter. There is a direct exchange of goods. Perhaps it is fish for vegetables, meat for grain, or various kinds of food in exchange for pots, baskets, or other manufactured goods. For this kind of simple trading, money is not needed, but there is often something that everyone wants and everybody can use, such as salt to flavour food, shells for ornaments, or iron and copper to make into tools and vessels. These things - salt, shells or metals - are still used as money in out-of-the-way parts of the world today.
Salt may seem rather a strange substance to use as money, but in countries where the food of the people is mainly vegetable, it is often an absolute necessity. Cakes of salt, stamped to show their value, were used as money in Tibet until recent times, and cakes of salt will still buy goods in Borneo and parts of Africa.
Cowrie sea shells have been used as money at some time or another over the greater part of the Old World. These were collected mainly from the beaches of the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, and were traded to India and China. In Africa, cowries were traded right across the continent from East to West. Four or five thousand went for one Maria Theresa dollar, an Austrian silver coin which was once accepted as currency in many parts of Africa.
Metal, valued by weight, preceded coins in many parts of the world. Iron, in lumps, bars or rings is still used in many countries instead of money. It can either be exchanged for goods, or made into tools, weapons or ornaments. The early money of China, apart from shells, was of bronze, often in flat, round pieces with a hole in the middle, called 'cash'. The earliest of these are between three thousand and four thousand years old - older than the earliest coins of the eastern Mediterranean.
Nowadays, coins and notes have supplanted nearly all the more picturesque forms of money, and although in one or two of the more remote countries people still hoard it for future use on ceremonial occasions such as weddings and funerals, examples of primitive money will soon be found only in museums.
Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency

Discuss: Do you agree with the ideas below? Why or why not?
 Whoever says that money can’t buy you happiness doesn’t know where to stop. (Telegraph Magazine)
 Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. (Woody Allen)
 Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does. (Jane Austen)

Read the text below and decide what ideas in it you agree and why.
They say that money causes most of the miseries of the world, but it also encourages a great deal of ingenuity and hard work. A sufficient income fosters an independent spirit. Friends and colleagues admire a man with money and tolerate, even approve eccentricities in him that they would deplore in a poorer man. The possession of money confers power and others will frequently estimate his intelligence and humanity precisely according to how much a man has in the bank. It is small wonder then that people have come to regard the acquisition of money as a thing worthy in itself. Yet what, after all, can one do with money except spend it and that quickly, before inflation depreciates its value? And how poor a thing it is! In earlier times, they fashioned coins from gold, silver and bronze, but what do they make our money of today? An alloy of cheap metal giving no cheerful jingle in the pocket, and flimsy bits of paper that we might well mistake for the toy money in a children's game. If we are honest with ourselves, we need to answer this question: do scraps of paper and worn bits of metal really represent our heart's desire? We spend our lives worrying about money. Some people occupy their entire working life in counting it. Why do we believe that money can buy happiness, when the reverse is so obviously the case?
Gerald Mosback Practical Faster Reading