Lesson 1: Look Out, You’re Surrounded! (By Commerce!)

Money, or to be more precise, the pursuit of wealth and prosperity drives almost everything people and societies do. What do you know about money? Do you know how it works in the world? What do you know about pursuing wealth and prosperity? The answers to these questions depend very much on whether you are financially literate.

Financial literacy is the ability to understand how money works in the world. There are many aspects to financial literacy, including understanding personal finance and money management, like how to get a car loan or balance a checking account. However, being 21st century financially literate increasingly requires a level of knowledge about global commerce, business, and innovation

Lesson One Topic

  • Commerce vs. business
  • Defining financial literacy
  • Inflation
  • Economic indicators
  • Consumers and consumerism
  • The Consumer Price Index.

Lesson One Objectives

  1. Compare business and commerce.
  2. Identify examples of commercial activity as local, domestic, or global.
  3. List the elements of global commerce.
  4. Explain the relationship of the consumer to commerce.
  5. Summarize economic indicators GDP, CCI and CPI.

What Does That Mean? e-flashcards

Lesson 1 has 16 personal finance and money management vocabulary terms.

Financial literacy
Understanding how money works in the world
Commerce
Activities that relate to the buying and selling of goods and services.
Economics
A social science concerned with the processes and systems by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought.
System of commerce
The system of businesses, government agencies, organizations and consumers that interact to enable business to operate, and money and goods to flow.
Business
A firm or enterprise that engages in the activity of making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in exchange for money.
Consumer
A person or group of people, who acquire goods or services as the final user of those products or services.
Local commerce
Interacting businesses and governments of a local or regional area.
Domestic commerce
Commerce carried on within the borders of a single country.
Global commerce
The worldwide system of businesses, government agencies, and organizations which interact to enable businesses to operate, and goods, money, and services to flow between nations.
SME
Small to medium-sized business enterprise.
Multinational company
A company that operates in several countries but is managed from its home country.
Trade balance
The value difference between a nation’s imports and exports.
Economic indicators
Collections of data which enable analysis of economic performance and predictions of future performance.
Gross Domestic Product
GDP; the total dollar value of all goods and services produced within a country’s borders annually.
Inflation
A sustained increase in the general prices of goods and services over a period of time.
E-commerce
The buying and selling of goods or services transacted over the internet.

Classroom Instructional Slides

Click here to link to classroom slides to help maintain students’ focus and attention during instruction.

Lesson 1 Going Global Look Out You're Surrounded cover

Download lesson slides (PDF)

Links to Instructional Resources

Commerce News (YouTube channel)
Learning Markets; Why Consumer Confidence Reports Matter (3:25 minute video)
Investopedia “The Consumer Price Index” (1:49 minute video)
Investopedia “What is Inflation?” (1:09 minute video)