In the American colonies, there was little money. England did not supply the colonies with coins and did not allow the colonies to make their own coins, except for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which received permission for a short period in 1652 to make several kinds of silver coins. England wanted to keep money out of America as a means of controlling trade: America was forced to trade only with England if it did not have the money to buy products from other countries. The result during this pre-revolutionary period was that the colonists used various goods in place of money: beaver pelts, Indian wampum, and tobacco leaves were all commonly used substitutes for money. The colonists also made use of any foreign coins they could obtain. Dutch, Spanish, French, and English coins were all in use in the American colonies.

During the Revolutionary War, funds were needed to finance the world, so each of the individual states and the Continental Congress issued paper money. So much of this paper money was printed that by the end of the war, almost no one would accept it. As a result, trade in goods and the use of foreign coins still flourished during this period.

By the time the Revolutionary War had been won by the American colonists, the monetary system was in a state of total disarray. To remedy this situation, the new Constitution of the United States, approved in 1789, allowed Congress to issue money. The individual states could no longer have their own money supply. A few years later, the Coinage Act of 1792 made the dollar the official currency of the United States and put the country on a bimetallic standard. In this bimetallic system, both gold and silver were legal money, and the rate of exchange of silver to gold was fixed by the government at sixteen to one.

The passage mainly discusses ___________.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer to each question.

Madison Square Garden, a world-famous sporting venue in New York City, has actually been a series of buildings in varied locations rather than a single building in one spot. In 1873, P.T. Barnum built Barnum’s Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome at the corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, across from Madison Square Park. Two years later, the bandleader Patrick Gilmore bought the property, added statues and fountains, and renamed it Gilmore’s Gardens. When Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the property in 1879, it was renamed Madison Square Garden.

A second very lavish Madison Square Garden was built at the same location in 1890, with a ballroom, a restaurant, a theater, a rooftop garden, and a main arena with seating for 15,000. However, this elaborate Madison Square Garden lasted until 1924 when it was torn down to make way for a forty-storey skyscraper.

When the second Madison Square Garden had been replaced in its location across from Madison Square Park, the boxing promoter Tex Rickard raised six million dollars to build a new Madison Square Garden. This new Madison Square Garden was constructed in a different location, on 8th Avenue and 50th Street and quite some distance from Madison Square Park and Madison Avenue. Rickard’s Madison Square Garden served primarily as an arena for boxing prize fights and circus events until it outgrew its usefulness by the late 1950s.

A new location was found for a fourth for Madison Square Garden, a top Pennsylvania Railroad Station, and plans were announced for its construction in 1960. This current edifice, which includes a huge sports arena, a bowling center, a 5,000-seat amphitheater, and a twenty-nine-storey office building, does retain the traditional name Madison Square Garden. However, the name is actually quite a misnomer. The building is not located near Madison Square, nor does it have the flowery gardens that contributed to the original name.