Listening p54 Warmer Write the names of these countries and currencies on the board: Countries: Saudi Arabia, Russia, Denmark, Switzerland, Vietnam, Poland, South Africa, India, Japan, France, China Currencies: Zloty, Swiss francs, Krone, Rupee, Yuan/Renminbi, Rand, Ruble, Riyal, Euro, Dong, Yen In pairs, students race to match the countries with the correct currencies. Key Countries China Denmark France India Japan Poland Russia Saudi Arabia South Africa Switzerland Vietnam 1
Currency Yuan/Renminbi (Renminbi refers to the whole Chinese monetary system) Krone Euro Rupee Yen Zloty Ruble Riyal Rand Swiss francs Dong
SPEAKING In pairs, students look at the photos and discuss what they think they show.
2 Students read the text and check their answers in 1. Key Photo 1: stone disks from the Yap Islands in Micronesia Photo 2: German paper money Photo 3: debit card Photo 4: Roman or Lydian coins 3 Students look at the gaps in the text and predict what words or types of word could fill each one.
Exam success Students read the tip on how to complete gapped texts in listening exams. Tell students to turn to page 77 (Listening – Completing notes) for more ideas.
Teacher development: Student training
Completing notes Students should always read the incomplete notes in a listening activity to understand the context and predict which words could fill the gaps. This type of listening exercise is often found in examination papers. One key technique is to look at the words before and the words after the gap and assess their grammatical connotation. For example, after an article, you will probably have a noun. After a verb, you could well have an adverb. This will limit the choice of answers and therefore increase the chance of guessing the right one. Students should then try and guess the word itself from the context. Tell students to make guesses and never leave a space on an exam paper. 4
Listening 20 Play the CD for students to listen to an interview with an expert on the history of money. Students complete gaps a–j in 2. Remind students that they must not write more than two words and/or a number for each answer.
Audioscript Presenter: When you’re out shopping and you want to buy something, you just put your hand in your pocket and take out some notes and coins or a debit card. So it might seem strange to think that money hasn’t always existed in those forms. One of the earliest ways to pay somebody was to give them a cow. Cows, of course, have always been valuable because they give food, milk and leather. On the Yap Islands in Micronesia, they once used what must be the most unusual money ever. They used enormous stone discs which were sometimes four metres in diameter. It must have been difficult to carry them around in their pockets. On the other hand, it can’t have been easy for thieves to steal them! Another type of money that seems unusual today is salt. As well as receiving coins, Roman soldiers earned a ration of salt for their work. They called this the ‘salarium’. That explains where the word ‘salary’ comes from. Salt must have been important to the Romans because, amongst other reasons, they could use it to preserve food. It may also have been important because you could use salt to pay for things in any country. This was useful for Roman soldiers who were often moving from one part of the Roman Empire to another. Turning to more recognisable forms of money, the Greek historian Herodotus said that the first people to make gold and silver coins were the Lydians in around 600 BCE. Lydia was a kingdom in Asia Minor. In fact, the first coins were not gold or silver, they were made of alectrum – that’s spelt A-L-E-C-TR-U-M – which is a mixture of gold and silver. Soon after, they separated the gold and silver and made coins from each metal separately. Coins were very practical because they were so easy to carry around. The Greeks soon began to make and use their own coins. Little by little, countries stopped using precious metals to make coins. The coins simply represented those precious metals. In fact, the Chinese always used base metals, not precious metals, for their coins. It was in tenth-century China that people started to use paper for money. This could have been because there was not enough metal to make a sufficient number of coins at the time. Metal, paper, and then, of course, plastic. You may think that the debit card has been around for a long time, but it’s a relatively recent invention. In the 1920s, people used cards to buy petrol or to buy things in department stores. Later cards appeared for use in restaurants. But it was only in 1978 that a bank in Seattle in the USA introduced the first debit card for business executives. By the mid-1980s, debit cards were available for general use. And what about money in the future? Some experts say that it won’t be long before physical forms of money disappear. They think that instead we might have special chips in our mobile phones to pay in shops. Other people say that coins and notes will probably stay around forever. A company called Travelex has already designed coins for use in space. They are called QUIDs and come in five different sizes and colours. The coins are made of a plastic material which is very strong and resistant to heat. The coins are all round so that they won’t hurt you when they float around your spaceship in zero gravity. Metal coins could be dangerous floating around in space. From four-metre stone discs to space-age plastic, it seems we just can’t exist without money in one form or another.
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