经济是现代社会生活的要紧组成部分，天天的新闻报道中都充满了有关预算赤字、股票风波、经济上扬或衰退的消息。但，货币、市场和经济到底是什么？全球或区域的经济到底是怎么样运作的？政府的政策又会怎么样影响到一个国家的经济情况呢？
请收听金融世界！
现代人的衣食住行都不能离开钱，也就是货币。
一个澳大利亚人要买些苹果和香蕉，售货员告诉他要付多少钱。
那样货币是如何进步至今的形态并且几乎主宰了大家全部的生活呢？澳大利亚一位著名的财经记者卡鲁特别为大家介绍了货币的历史。
卡鲁在她的介绍中说到如此几个 词语 ：
1 Precious metal 贵重金属
2 Sweating the money 从货币里提取贵重金属成分
3 Holey dollar 有洞的钱币，这是十九世纪在澳大利亚新南威尔士州流通的货币，由于缺少金属材料而将钱币穿洞
4 Token1 辅币，具备象征性的货币，代表的价值高于本身的价值
5 Plastic note 塑料钞票
6 Plastic card （塑料）信用卡，也叫 credit2 card
下面大家逐段听一遍卡鲁的这段谈话：
Money's got a very colourful history, because a number of things have been used in the place of what we use as money. Feathers, shells, cloth ...salt in Roman times when the Roman soldiers were paid in salt and that's how we get the word salary, from the Latin3 sal for salt.
历史上的货币五花八门。古时候，羽毛、贝壳、布料甚至盐都曾是交换工具。古罗马士兵得到的军饷就是盐。盐这个词也是英文薪资这个词的由来。拉丁文Sal的意思是盐，英文中薪资Salary就是从它演变而来的。
And a number of tribes4 used cattle, which were useful because they were transportable. But they were quite bulky and you weren't always sure of the size of cattle you were going to get, so there was a problem there of quality.
还有一些部落以牲畜作为交换媒介。这非常有用，由于牲畜可以运来运去。但它们体积庞大，而且没办法确切了解你将要得到的牲畜的大小，因此存在水平方面的问题。
In the ninth century in China we had paper money for the first time. It wasn't quite the paper money that we know, it was more like a piece of paper saying a promise to pay.
九世纪时在中国初次出现了纸币。这种纸币与大家目前用的不同，更象是一种欠条。
