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this week's Leveled Readers. See pp. 42f–42g for 
Long ago, people had to wander from place to place searching for food. But about 10,000 years ago, people found that if they collected seeds and planted them, a crop would grow. They also learned to tame wild animals. Now they had a permanent food supply, and there was no need to wander. Gradually, small villages grew up. These people made baskets, sacks, and pots for storing their food. They also made tools to dig the land, harvest their crops, and build their homes. Over the years, they discovered that some people were better at making pots, while others were better at making baskets or hoes. The pot-maker might exchange a pot for some food, or a tool. Someone who made an ax might feel it was worth four pots because the ax took longer to make. The people must have agreed upon a fair way of exchanging items.People carefully chose the place where they settled. Villages often grew up where there was good soil for growing crops, or plenty of clay for making pots, or reeds for making baskets. As a result, some villages might have more grain than they needed or more pots than they needed. If the people could not trade goods within the village, they took them to a marketplace. Here people from several villages met to exchange their goods for items they needed. This system of trading is called barter. Often it works well, but sometimes there are problems, as in the following example.Four people, each with something to barter, arrive at the marketplace. One has fish and wants a spear, another has a spear and needs grain, a third has grain and would like a pot, and the fourth has a pot but wants a spear. Unfortunately, no one gets anything.It became obvious that a system of exchange does not always work, so people in different parts of the world developed ways of solving this problem. Certain objects were agreed upon as being precious. If you sold something, you received a number of these objects. If you then wanted to buy something, you would pay with them. These objects were used as money.In some Pacific Islands, people used stone wheels for buying and selling goods. Cattle, tools, weapons, packets of salt, cacao beans, glass beads, and bricks of pressed tea have all been used as money. In parts of Africa, people used cowrie shells. But when traders arrived from India, they would not sell their goods for cowrie-shell money. In India, thousands of these shells were washed up on the beaches, so to the Indians, this kind of money was worthless.continued on page TR1by Carolyn Kain