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WotD: Gold Standard
The first thing to know is that the gold standard has two possible meanings.
Back in the day before the Great Depression, all currency was supported or backed by what was then called the gold standard.
For all the currency a government created, it held an equal value of gold in the government bank.
That meant that before the 1930s, you could take your money, whether a paper bill or a metal coin, go to a bank, and exchange it for an equal amount of gold.
Gold supported the cash.
Gold is cumbersome and difficult to carry around with you.
Therefore, society used paper bills and coins instead.
They could always retrieve the value of the money they had in gold whenever they wanted.
Canada left the gold standard entirely in 1933.
The US partially ended the policy in the same year but didn’t ultimately end it until 1971.
The second meaning of gold standard is when a product or service is a perfect example of high quality.
It then becomes the example to follow, and other things of the same type are compared to it.
Today, I chose a picture of the interior of a Bentley sedan to illustrate the meaning of gold standard.
Why did I do that?
Well, a Bentley is considered the best high-quality luxury car that money can buy.
Almost everything in the car is bespoke, custom-made to order.
The quality of a Bentley is considered the gold standard of luxury.
No matter what luxury car you choose to compare to a Bentley, the Bentley will always be the best.
That’s why it is the gold standard of luxury cars.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 69.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.