Your pretend tags did not all change alike. One price can rise while another stays the same. That is why one expensive toy cannot tell us what happened across an economy.

Inflation means a rise in the general price level. Economy means the wider system of making, buying and selling goods and services. To study inflation, people consider a much broader set of prices than our few invented tags.

An old catalog or a relative’s memory can spark another comparison. Check the date, the amount sold and what the item was. A different pack size or a hazy memory can change the comparison. Neither alone measures a country’s inflation.

If an amount of money stays unchanged while relevant prices rise, that amount may buy less. That is a change in purchasing power. You can test it with pretend tokens and a changed tag. Keep the small observation useful without pretending it represents every family or every price.

Demand is how much buyers want and can buy under given conditions. Supply is how much sellers offer under given conditions. Changes in demand or difficulty supplying things can put pressure on prices. Real inflation can have several contributing causes.

Now try a clearly pretend price: ten tokens, then twelve, then thirteen. The first rise is two tokens. The next is one. The price rose more slowly, but it did not fall.

Disinflation means inflation slows down. Deflation means the general price level falls. These names describe different broad patterns. Our three toy numbers only illustrate the difference; they cannot establish either pattern for a country.

Look again at your invented tags. Which rose? Which stayed still? Describe what you have evidence for. Then ask about the wider supply and demand conditions you did not observe. The useful discovery is that a slower climb still goes upward, and one climb cannot explain an entire economy.