Basic Maths For Dummies by Beveridge Colin

Author:Beveridge, Colin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Working with Cold, Hard Cash

In This Chapter

Doing sums and rounding with money

Calculating currency

Using money in real life

Money is so deeply ingrained in our culture that defining money in a useful way is quite difficult. Basically, money is anything you can exchange for goods or services, and is used to value those goods or services. Money normally takes the form of coins and notes of certain, fixed values, but it can also exist only in the innards of a computer somewhere – when I pay my rent, a program in the depths of my bank changes something on a disk that makes me poorer and my landlord richer, although I never directly give my landlord either coins or notes. Money also takes different forms (currencies) in different countries. You can get into all sorts of philosophical arguments about whether money actually is the notes and coins, or simply what they represent, but here is not the place for that discussion.

In this chapter, I give you a brief introduction to money as used in the UK and the sums you need to be able to do in the normal course of life. For this reason, this chapter is useful both for day-to-day living and for any maths exams you hope to take.

I show you how to use the Table of Joy to convert money from one currency to another, so you can splash your cash on holiday. I also run you through some of the more complicated money sums you may need to tackle at some point.

Seeing What You Already Know

The Sumerians invented money about 4,000 years ago as a way to make trading easier. By using money, if you owned a cow and wanted a haircut, you didn’t need to find a barber who wanted a cow – you could simply sell the cow to someone and then use the money for a short back and sides.

Money sums work like normal sums. Most money sums have a decimal point, but you still add, take away, times and divide with money, just like you do with regular numbers.

To show that a number represents money, in most countries you put a currency marker before the number. For example, to show ten pounds, you write £10. If you’re dealing with dollars instead, you write $10.

The £ is a fancy letter L, which comes from the old Latin name for pounds, libra. The euro symbol, €, is just a fancy E. The dollar sign, $, isn’t a fancy S but is probably based on the shape of Spanish doubloons – the ‘pieces of eight’ that pirates and their parrots jabber on about.

Counting coins and notes

The UK has a pretty limited range of coins: the small-value copper coins (the 1p and the bigger 2p); the medium-value silver coins (the 5p and the bigger 10p are round, while the 20p and the bigger 50p are seven-sided); and the higher-value gold coins (the £1 and the bigger £2, which has a silver bit in the middle).

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