Lori Fletcher, age 9, of Cleveland, Oklahoma, for her question:

What kind of paper do they use to make money?

When you study a dollar bill in fine detail, you must agree that it is a work of art. Talented artists engraved its handsome designs and all those delicate lines. Super printing presses ran off the beautifully printed bills from these engravings. All this careful work was done by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This branch of the Government makes the only genuine bills that sae can use. There are reasons why they have to be very, very careful.

There are a few lazy characters called counterfeiters. They try to copy our real money and make phony bills. This is greedy and unfair to the rest of us. When we get fooled by one of their phony bills, we find it is worth nothing at all. So the government makes its bills very hard to copy. It is hard to copy their fine engravings. It is even harder to copy the sturdy paper they use. This is because the recipe used to make the paper is kept secret. Another  top secret recipe is used to make the special printing ink. If we knew these money making secrets, the phony counterfeiters would know them, too.