Currency and Culture (oral presentation)

This is the first of two research assignments on currency and culture. The two assignments will be:

An oral presentation on a currency used within a specific group of people. Your oral presentation will primarily be factual, and should focus on other peoples' ideas.
A thesis paper which explores how the currency affects and is influenced by the people's culture. You'll elaborate on the research you did for your oral presentation and defend your own ideas about the way money relates to the culture.

You will select a specific group of people with a common currency, who shares a set of traits such as shared beliefs, historical time, governmental structure and/or geography. In your presentation, you should address what the currency is, focusing on what makes the currency interesting. You might discuss some of the following:

physical characteristics of the currency,
whether the currency is easily divisible,
whether and how the currency is backed,
who produces the currency,
when did the currency first appear and why,
how the currency is used, saved, and exchanged, and/or
how much value the currency has outside the group.

You will give a 10-20 minute PowerPoint presentation to the class and be prepared to field questions. (The presenter should feel free to say, "I don't know," in response to a question; better that than to answer a question with pure speculation.) You should e-mail me the PowerPoint presentation so that I receive it before 8am of the day you are schedule to present. In addition (just in case) be sure a copy of the presentation is in your home directory or bring it to class on a disk or the like.

This oral presentation is worth 10% of your final course grade. I will assess it using the following grading guidelines:

A grade of F is reserved for a failure to comply with the terms of the assignment.
The D presentation, in some significant way, fails to address the question asked.
The C presentation, while it attempts to addresses the question, is sufficiently hard to follow that the audience may not understand what makes the currency interesting. The presentation may be poorly organized, or the presenter may not explain the currency's central attributes. Sometimes the C presentation is well prepared, but isn't practiced. As a consequence, the oral portion of the presentation is rushed, choppy, or garbled.
The B presentation is easy to follow and addresses the question asked. Most of the slides have enough information to help the presentation, but not so much information that the slide detract from the presentation. The presentation is comfortably paced, giving the audience time to absorb any material on the slides and time to hear what the presenter is saying. The presentation clearly identifies both what the currency is and what properties of the currency or how it's used are most interesting. The presenter might be nervous and might have to stop to collect his or her thoughts at times, but the presentation is still clear.
The A presentation has all the qualities of a B presentation, but in addition it is lively, well paced, and interesting. The sure mark of an A presentation is that the reader continues to think about it after the presentation is over.