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Money has no smell

People say that these words belong to Vespasian, an emperor of Rome. Suetonius, a Roman historian, writes that the words were used by Vespasian on the following occasion. Once the emperor’s son Titus reproached his father that he had introduced a tax on public lavatories. Vespasian told him to smell the money he was holding in his palm and to see if the smell was not foul. Titus said that the smell was not foul. Vespasian remarked that money was in the urine, because it had been just paid as the tax on lavatories.

The dollar

The dollar is the basic unit of United States money. It is worth 100 cents. The dollar is also the main currency unit of many countries in the world. The dollar was adopted in the USA in 1792. The first US dollars were issued in silver and gold. After 1934, however, all gold coins were taken out of circulation. A silver dollar was issued at various times from 1794 until 1935. The dollar was adopted in Canada in 1878. Australia adopted the dollar in 1966 and New Zealand in 1967.

The pound

The basic unit of money of the United Kingdom is the pound, also called the pound sterling. Today the pound is equal to 100 pence. The British adopted the decimal system in 1971. Things were far more complicated in the past. The pound was subdivided into 20 shillings. The shilling was subdivided into 12 pennies. The guinea was equal to one pound one shilling. It was a gold coin used in fixing prices of valuable goods. There also were crowns, 5 -shilling silver coins; half crowns worth 2 shillings and 6 pence; florins, 2 -shilling silver coins; bobs worth 12 pence. a sixpence was a 6 -penny coin and a 3 -penny coin was called a “three pence”. There also were “ha’ pennies”, copper coins, worth half a penny, and farthings, or quarter - penny coins.

The tenge

The tenge is the currency of Kazakhstan. It is divided into 100 tiyin . It was introduced on 15th of November 1993 to replace the Soviet ruble at a rate of 1 tenge = 500 rubles. The ISO-4217 code is KZT.

The word tenge in the Kazakh and most other Turkic languages means a set of scales. The origin of the word is the Turkic teğ- which means being equal, balance. The name of this currency is thus similar to the lira, pound and peso. The name of the currency is related to the Russian word for money Russian: деньги / den'gi/, which was borrowed from Turkic.

2.Translate the first two paragraphs of the text without dictionary

3. Guess the meaning of highlighted words or phrases, explain them.

5.Reading the text and retelling it.

"It scares me," said Jack Hills, an astronomer at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It really does." He and the rest of the world had good reason to be worried. Astronomer Brian Marsden, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had just announced that a newly discovered asteroid 1.6 km wide was headed for Earth and might pass as close as 48,000km in the year 2028. "The chance of an actual collision is small," Marsden reported, "but not entirely out of the question."

An actual collision? With an asteroid of that size? It sounded like the stuff of science fiction and grade-B movies. But front-page stories and TV newscasts around the world soon made clear that the possibility of a direct hit and a global catastrophe well within the lifetime of most people on Earth today was all too real.

Then suddenly, the danger was gone. Barely a day later, new data and new calculations showed that the asteroid, dubbed 1997 XF11, presented no threat at all. It would miss Earth by 1 million Km - closer than any previously observed asteroid of that size but a comfortable distance. Still, the incident focused attention once and for all on the largely ignored danger that asteroids and comets pose to life on Earth.

XF11 was discovered last Dec. 6 by astronomer Jim Scotti, a member of the University of Arizona's Spacewatch group, which scans the skies for undiscovered comets and asteroids. Using a 77-year-old telescope equipped with an electronic camera, he had recorded three sets of images. The digitized images, fed into a computer programmed to look for objects moving against the background of fixed stars, revealed an asteroid that Scotti, in an e-mail to Marsden, described as standing out "like a sore thumb."