Reading Comprehension from Money 1, 2, & 3

Exercise 1
Fill in the blank with the following words:

spices, distances, system, agree, gold, worth,
invent, precious, bartering, kilometres, descriptions,
find, buildings, want, value, agree,

1 Before money was ________ , people used to swap things they thought had a similar value.
2 If a wheat farmer wanted some chickens, he needed to ________ a chicken farmer who wanted some wheat.
3 Then both farmer had to ________ how much wheat to swap for each chicken.
4 It was sometimes difficult to agree on what goods were ________ , so that both sides could be satisfied with the deal.
5 This system of swapping things was called ________ .
6 On the walls of ancient Egyptian _________ , constructed 4,500 years ago, are pictures and writing describing bartering.
7 From these ________ , we know that bartering was used in Egypt at that time.
8 If the goods that you wanted were not produced in your area, you had to travel long ________ to swap the things you had grown or made with other people.
9 People who lived around the Mediterranean Sea , between Europe and North Aferica, travelled hundreds of ________ by land and sea to barter goods.
10 People from Greece and Brete transported olive oil, pottery and metalwork to Egypt and swapped them for valuable vases and ________ jewels.
11 The Romans, who lived in Italy, took olive oil, wool and wine to places where they could swap them for ________ from Arbia, gold from West Africa, wheat from North Africa and silk from China.
12 If the people you were bartering with didn't ________ your goods, you couldn't buy anything from them.
13 People realised that a better system was needed: a system that used something that could always be swapped and that always had the same ________.
14 Everyone ________ that metals, such as gold and silver, could be used.
15 So around 4,000 years ago, some people started paying each other in ________ and silver.

Check your answers carefully.

Exercise 2

Fill in the blank with the following words:

scales, buy, places, right, common, enough
systems, mistakes, paintings, type,

1 Bartering was still used in many places, but slowly it became more ________ to buy and sell goods using precious metals.
2 However, even today, bartering is used in many ________ around the world.
3 Ancient Egytian ________ on the walls of buildings constructed 3,500 years ago, show gold being carefully weighed out on scales.
4 The paintings tell us that, by this time, gold was being used as a ________ of money in Egypt. 5 The more gold you had, the more goods you could ________.
6 Every time you bought or sold something with gold, you had to carefully weigh out the metal to make sure you paid the ________ amount.
7 Every shop owner had a set of ________ to make sure they were paid enough gold.
8 It was easy to make ________ , and some people cheated by using heavier weights on one side of their scales.
9 An even better ________ for buying and selling goods was needed.

Exercise 3:

Fill in the blanks with the following words:

thousand, wondered, pocket, clothing,
agreed, wheel, received, round, salt,

1 How would you like to be paid a handful of large seashells instead of your ________ money?
2 How would you feel if you ________ a bar of salt?
3 What would you do if a large, four-metre wide stone ________ was rolled into your room on pockie-money day?
4 If you had lived a ________ years ago, you would have thought that a stone wheel was just fine.
5 In those days, if someone had given you a handful of coins or a five-dollar note, you would have ________ what they were?
6 Seashells, bars of salt and large, ________ rocks have all been used as money in the past.
7 They could be used to buy good, such as food or ________ , and to pay people for work they had done.
8 These items had value that people in different parts of the world ________ upon.

Exercise 4

barter, travels, grown, transported, cheated,
swap, parcel, satisfy, describe, weighed,
invented, agree, realised , construct,

1 They ________ the old woman of her house and money.
2 He ________ the parcel by hand.
3 I think we should stop; do you ________?
4 I ________ what he meant.
5 The goods will be ________ to Tokyo by air.
6 She has ________ into a beautiful young lady.
7 Light travels faster than sound.
8 Words cannot ________ the beauty of the scene.
9 It took them two years to ________ the bridge.
10 They ________ grains for cloth.
11 He ________ a new type of stethoscope.
12 I'll ________ you three of mine for one of yours.
13 Our company will do everything to ________ our customers.

Exercise 4:

Fill in the blank with the following words:

manufactured, metals, problem, necessary, pellets,
sliced, another, exactly, stamped, shave,
invented, ideal, expensive

1 Three thousand years ago, the people living around the Mediterranean Sea began to use coins made of precious ________, such as gold and silver.
2 Coins were always the same weight, so you knew ________ how much gold or silver you were being paid.
3 In Turkey, the first coins were small ________ , marked with a simple design that indicated the coin's weight.
4 But it didn't take people long to figure out that you could ________ tiny pieces of metal off a pellet and no-one would notice.
5 If you ________ enough pieces off pellets, you saved a lot of money!
6 In China, over 4,000 years ago, an even better system had already been ________.
7 The Chinese had realised that it wasn't ________ to make coins out of gold and silver.
8 As long as everyone agreed that the coins had a particular value, they could be ________ from any metal, even a cheap one.
9 The Chinese government made their coins out of iron, and ________ them with a certain value.
10 It was an ________ way to stop people slicing off pieces of precious metal from valuable coins.
11 A thousand years ago, the Chinese invented ________ money system.
12 Carrying so many coins around was a ________ , especially if you wanted to buy something really expensive.

Exercises 5:

speaial, forgers, serial, sacks, invented,
printing, carry, easier, paper,

1 Many horses were needed to carry ________ of coins!
2 So ________ money was invented.
3 Unfortunately, paper money was not only easier to ________ around, it was also easier to copy!
4 People who copied paper money were known as ________.
5 The governments of countries that used paper money had to use many different paper-________ techniques to make the paper money difficult to copy.
6 Nine hundred years ago, the Chinese government started to use ________ paper and began to print its paper money in colour, to make it harder to forge.
7 Each note was printed with its own number, called a ________ number.
8 This made its ________ to find out if a note had been copied or not.