On Money

Remember in class I was talking about Literature as being "excellent writing expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest"? It's interesting that money was mentioned - I think we all know that in most society today, money is a big thing in everyone's life. People can lie, cheat, fight, and die to get it, and money very much equals to survival in our world today.

But it didn't used to be like this. There was a time when money wasn't invented. Before money came, people exchanged goods and services, and that was 'barter trading'. Then people started using different things to represent value, anything from salt, barley, seashells, silk, cows and of course precious metals, or whatever that culture believes is valuable. *

But then a cow can't live forever, and salt can dissolve away in water and silk can get torn. So people started using metals, which are rare and shiny and nice. Then to make things easier to carry around, paper money was finally invented.

So. The interesting thing is that in rural areas of certain countries, people still do barter trading because there's not much of a market for them to buy and sell things. If you're a hunter and occasionally need some clothes, you can just exchange your hunt for some. You don't have to do hard work just to get some paper money.

50 million dollar notes

And then there are places with economies so bad that their money is worthless. Zimbabwe is so poor that it lacks many necessities, people have no jobs and there's also no goods to buy. $100,000 probably isn't enough to buy toothpaste, for the Zimbabweans.

Multi-million dollar sweets

You need a bundle to eat at a restaurant! Pictures from Pictzz

We should be glad Singapore has a strong economy, we can buy things like electronic gadgets cheaply because of that, and holidays to many places are not as expensive too.

*Part of the information from Wikipedia