1. The English word pay comes from a
Latin word, paco, meaning to pacify.
2. Bullion is gold or silver, which may be
in the forms of bars, nuggets,
ingots, dust, or coins.
3. Fiat money is money that has no gold or
silver reserves to support it.
4. Paper currency issued for temporary use,
usually in an emergency, is
known as scrip.
5. A token coin is a coin with a face value
less than the value of the
metal it contains.
6. The earliest known monetary documents are
"due bills" written on clay
tablets, which show what a purchaser owed to a merchant; they were used in
Babylon in the 3000s BCE.
7. The first metal coins, known as staters,
were minted in China.
8. The first metal coins were made of
electrum, a mixture of silver and copper.
9. The Chinese printed some of the earliest
paper money on mulberry bark.
10. Roman soldiers were paid in spices, such
as nutmeg, pepper, and cloves,
as wages for their services.
11. The first paper money used in North
America consisted of playing cards,
used in the Canadian colonies for several years following their
introduction in about 1685, and marked with a certain value and signed by
the governor.
12. The first coin offically issued by the
United States government was the
Pine-Tree Shilling.
13. Fractional units of the Japanese yen
(introduced by the Meiji
government in 1871), which are known as the sen (1/100th of the yen) and
the rin (1/1,000th of the yen) were taken out of circulation in 1945.
14. The currency reserve units of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
a specialized agency of the United Nations, are called Special Drawing Rights
(SDRs).
15. The Venezuelan monetary unit is the
bolivar.
16. Brazil’s monetary unit is the rial.
17. The Thai monetary unit is the zloty.
18. Tribesmen of the Santa Cruz Islands,
near Australia, trapped jungle
birds and glued their feathers to a rope cord at one time, to create money.
19. The Euro is the offical monetary unit of
12 European countries
including Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland,
Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.
20. Each Euro has a common European design
on one side and one of fifteen
individual national designs showing the country of its origin on the other.
21. The Euro has seven different
denominations of coins and eight of banknotes.
22. The West German mark of the 1990s was
valued more highly
internationally than in 1960.
23. The South African unit of currency, the
Rand, is divided into 100 Huch.
24. Today all United States legal tender
coins are made of metal alloys.
25. E-Bullion is an electronic international
e-currency advertised to be
fully backed by physical precious metals in storage facilities.
