"If You Made a Million"
by David M. Schwartz

Student Edition
Unit 1, pp. 90–109

Nonfiction text explains something about real life. What do you think you may learn about from this Selection Snapshot?

Have you ever earned a penny, a nickel, or a dime? What are these coins worth? A penny is worth one cent. Five pennies is equal to a nickel. A dime has the same value as two nickels or ten pennies.
Suppose someone gave you 25 cents. They might give you a quarter, which is equal to five nickels, or two dimes and one nickel, or three nickels and one dime, or even 25 pennies.
If you earned a dollar, you would have an amount equal to four quarters, or 10 dimes, or 20 nickels, or 100 pennies. You could buy bubbles with your dollar, or you could put it in the bank. The bank will pay you interest for letting it use your money. The longer your money stays in the bank, the more interest it earns. After twenty years, your dollar plus interest would equal about $2.70.
You could take five one-dollar bills and trade them in for one five-dollar bill. Money works that way. Every large bill is equal to bills of a smaller amount. The biggest bill is a hundred-dollar bill. Suppose you wanted to buy something that cost a lot, like a big, expensive elephant. That elephant might cost a thousand dollars. You could pay for it with ten hundred-dollar bills or 100,000 pennies.
But do you want to carry so much money around? Instead you could write a check for $1,000. The seller puts the check in his bank. His bank gets $1,000 of your money from your bank and adds it to the seller's money. That's how checks work.
Now think about how you could buy something bigger than an elephant, like a house. Do you have enough money for a house? If not, you could ask a bank to lend you some. You could pay back a little every month. You would also pay interest to the bank for letting you use its money.
You'll need a job to pay back your loan. Try to find something you like to do. Maybe you would like to train ogres. You could make a lot of money doing that. You might even make a million dollars. Now that's big money. A million dollars in one-dollar bills would weigh over a ton. (That's 2,000 pounds.) Maybe you want to take a check. As you can see, dealing with money means making choices.

If You Made a Million by David M. Schwartz, 1989. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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