Money is what people use to buy the things they need.

A long time ago people didn’t use money. They would trade something they owned for something they needed. This was called bartering.

Thousands of years ago, when most people were hunters and farmers bartering worked fine.

For example, a farmer would trade vegetables they grew to a hunter for meat.

Bartering worked for many years until it was no longer convenient to trade. The solution to this problem was money.

There are different kinds of money… coins and paper money.

After bartering, metal became the most popular form of money in most of Europe and Asia. People used gold, silver, and copper as money because they were pretty and hard to get.The first metal money was in lumps and bars, and how much it was worth depended on how much it weighed.

This wasn't very convenient, because if someone only wanted to spend part of their money, they had to melt down the metal to divide it up.

Eventually, people figured out that they could make metal into pieces of equal size and weight. They stamped the weight on the pieceof metal, along with some design that proved it was real,like a picture of the king. These were the first coins. Today in the United States, coins are made at a place called the United States Mint.