This is the first episode of Curious Kids, which is a brand-new series that is targeted towards youngsters. The Conversation asks kids to submit questions they’d like an expert to address. Any questions are welcome: bizarre, serious, or even wacky! Email your inquiry to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
If you peek inside the wallets of your parents, you’ll discover brightly-colored plastic sheets as well as a few plastic cards. These plastic cards and notes can be described as “money,” which your parents used to purchase food, clothing, and gorgeous toys.
When I was a kid I was a child, I read Pinocchio’s Adventures of Pinocchio. Pinocchio is an animated character that was a child. The puppet believed in the idea that wealth was a growth in trees. He took a little bit of time to realize that this wasn’t the case.
The money doesn’t come from trees. Your parents must work at a job in order to earn it.
The plastic notes originate from a location known as”the Federal Reserve Bank of Australia. You could call it “the RBA” for short.
The RBA is in Sydney. The staff there are the ones who operate a machine that prints and cuts yellow, blue, red, purple, and blue plastic notes you’ve been able to find in the wallets of your parents.
The nice folks at RBA are able to print the amount of notes they’d like. However, they realize that when they print more than they can afford to print, something unpleasant could occur. This unpleasant issue is known as “inflation.” I’ll explain exactly what it signifies.
When there are a lot of notes being circulated, the people begin to spend increasing amounts of money. Since there’s so much money being spent, shops start charging more for things such as clothing and food, as well as beautiful toys. Everything gets more expensive. That’s inflation.
When you hear your parents say, “Life is too expensive,” It is possible to blame it on the rise in inflation.
It wasn’t always the case that we had money that was as modern as the ones that you have nowadays. Just a few thousand years ago, people couldn’t purchase items, but they would trade. For instance, you might change some of the vegetables you have in your garden with a friend to acquire Ham, for example.
This worked for a short time. However, humans realized it was simpler to make small coins and notes instead of hunting for food items, shells, or even salt to trade. And that’s when the currency system came into existence.
The plastic cards in the wallet of your parents can also be used as money. The plastic notes that are colored are stunning. However, you could lose the letters, and it’s a challenge to store them in all your wallets if you’re in need of a lot of them for buying lots of items.
Instead of messing around with many notes, people place their notes into a location known as”a “bank.” The bank stores the messages securely and provides you with a credit card in exchange.
If your parents have to borrow some money from a banking institution, they will use this card. They insert the card into a machine. The machine scans the card and recognizes that the holder of the card is holding notes at the bank. Your parents inform the device what percentage of messages they wish to get back, and the device then gives them their money.
There’s an additional bonus: these cards can be used to purchase things now and pay the following month!
Your parents don’t even have to go to the market with money made of paper. They are able to go to the shop using their credit card and present it to the proprietor of the shop. The shop’s owner will inform the bank that they’ve bought a few items. Next month, the bank will demand your parent’s payment for these items with their paper notecards.
The reason for this is that plastic cards are essentially the same as plastic currency.