金融英語貨幣的歷史及作用

　　現在在我們的身邊到處都有金融，那麼你會金融的英語句子嗎，今天小編就給大家看看金融英語，希望能幫助到大家。

　　金融英語：貨幣的歷史

　　i. history of money

　　一、貨幣歷史

　　money's got a very colourful history, because a number of things have been used in the place of what we use as money. feathers, shells, cloth ……salt in roman times when the roman soldiers were paid in salt and that's how we get the word salary, from the latin sal for salt.　　歷史上的貨幣五花八門。古時候，羽毛、貝殼、布料甚至鹽都曾是交換工具。古羅馬士兵得到的軍餉就是鹽。鹽這個詞也是英文“工資”這個詞的起源。拉丁文sal的意思是鹽，英文中工資salary就是從它演變而來的。

　　and a number of tribes used cattle, which were useful because they were transportable. but they were quite bulky and you weren't always sure of the size of cattle you were going to get, so there was a problem there of quality.　　還有一些部落以牲畜作為交換媒介。這很有用，因為牲畜可以運來運去。但是它們體積龐大，而且無法確切知道你將要得到的牲畜的大小，因此存在質量方面的問題。

　　in the ninth century in china we had paper money for the first time. it wasn't quite the paper money that we know, it was more like a piece of paper saying a promise to pay.　　九世紀時在中國首次出現了紙幣。這種紙幣與我們現在使用的不同，更象是一種欠條。

　　and then in the seventh century we had money in the form of precious metal. there was always a problem of making sure that the coin that you got had enough precious metal in it to give it a value. when things got tough, you often found some civilisations were quite good at what they called sweating the money, which was effectively taking out the precious metal content so that what you got actually wasn't what you thought you got.　　另外在七世紀時出現了貴重金屬貨幣。但如何確切知道貨幣中有足夠的貴重金屬含量以使它具有相應的價值則一直是個問題。當時局艱難時，一些文明古國會從這種貨幣中提取貴重金屬成份，使得貨幣已不再擁有你原來以為它擁有的價值。

　　and we have a form of that here in australia when we had the holey dollar …… when we had a coin with a hole in the middle because there was a shortage of metal.

　　澳大利亞就曾有過一種這類的貨幣，一種中間有個洞的貨幣。這是由於當時缺乏鑄幣金屬的緣故。

　　and in those days, spanish coins were used a lot. sometimes stores used certain tokens because there was a shortage of actual coinage. and then there is money as we know it today in notes and coins - plastic notes.

　　那時候西班牙硬幣廣為流通。有時商店裡因為沒有足夠的硬幣而使用一些代用幣。後來就有了我們現在使用的紙鈔、硬幣，還有塑料鈔票。

　　and of course, if we were doing this program in a hundred years time we might talk about quaint little things called money, notes and coins, because all we'd be using would be plastic card.

　　當然，如果我們在一百年之後再來製作這一節目，我們可能就會談論一些奇特有趣的叫做錢、紙幣或是硬幣的小東西，因為到那時我們大概只使用塑料卡了。

　　金融英語：貨幣的作用

　　II、Three Essential Functions Of Money

　　We look at the functions of money. Firstly it's a medium of exchange, so it's some commodity which facilitates the exchange of goods and services.

　　首先貨幣是一種交換媒介，是幫助其他貨物與服務進行交換的手段。

　　It is also a unit of account, which means that we use money to reckon prices and reckon values for comparisons between goods and services or over time.

　　其次它是一種計算單位，就是說我們用錢來測量貨物、服務或時間之間的價格和價值的比較。

　　And thirdly, money is a store of value. It is an asset. It's something that we can use to store value away to be retrieved at a later point in time. So we can not consume today, we can hold money instead - and transfer that consumption power to some point in the future.

　　第三它是價值儲存手段，是一種資產。我們可以用它把價值儲存起來，在以後的某個時刻再取回。這樣我們不必現在就把它用掉，而是可以存著錢，把這種消費能力轉移到將來的某個時刻。

　　In the earliest days, for example in ancient Babylon, measures of wheat were the money commodity. People would exchange other goods and services firstly by exchanging quantities of wheat. And eventually it was worked out by the Babylonian priests that they could hold the wheat in a central store and then simply keep records of who owned the wheat. And rather than physically moving the wheat around, eventually we had a primitive system - quite advanced by the terms of the day - of record keeping. We had ledgers.

　　古時候，比如在古巴比倫，小麥被當作實物貨幣使用。人們在交換其它貨物和服務之前先要交換一定數量的小麥。後來巴比倫的祭司們發現，他們可以把小麥儲存在一箇中心倉庫中，然後只需要記錄下誰擁有這些小麥就可以了。這樣就用不著把小麥搬來搬去了，於是我們就有了在當時條件下很先進的原始簿記制度，也就是分戶賬。

　　Notes：

　　1.Medium of exchange 交換媒介

　　2.Unit of account 計算單位

　　3.Store of value 價值儲存手段

　　4 money commodity 商品貨幣，實物貨幣

　　5 primitive system of record keeping 原始簿記制度

　　6 ledger 分戶賬 轉