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Here are some interesting facts that help visually oriented people like me make large sums of money tangible in my mind. Please comment if you enjoy facts like this.
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In order to understand a big, abstract number like one million or one billion, it helps to put it in terms of things we experience every day. But even then, big numbers stretch the imagination.
Big numbers can be really hard to understand. Whenever a word ends in “—illions,†it’s easy to just think of it as a whole lot of something, and nothing more. But there is a huge difference between one million and one trillion.
[h=3]How much is one trillion?[/h] How many millions are in one trillion? Are there one hundred millions in a trillion? One thousand millions?
There are one million millions in a trillion.
One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. That is 12 zeros.
[h=3]Trillions in Time[/h]
[h=3]What is Innumeracy?[/h] In his bestselling book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, John Allan Paulos defines innumeracy as “an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance.â€
He tells the following story of how not intuitively understanding big numbers keeps us from getting the joke:
Copied and pasted.
In order to understand a big, abstract number like one million or one billion, it helps to put it in terms of things we experience every day. But even then, big numbers stretch the imagination.
Big numbers can be really hard to understand. Whenever a word ends in “—illions,†it’s easy to just think of it as a whole lot of something, and nothing more. But there is a huge difference between one million and one trillion.
[h=3]How much is one trillion?[/h] How many millions are in one trillion? Are there one hundred millions in a trillion? One thousand millions?
There are one million millions in a trillion.
One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. That is 12 zeros.
- One trillion is more stars than there are in the entire Milky Way galaxy.[Prove it…]
[h=3]Trillions in Time[/h]
- One million seconds will pass in the next 12 days.One billion seconds will take 32 years.One trillion seconds will pass in 31,688 years. [Prove it…]
- Time is money, right? If you make one dollar every second, you will have a million dollars in twelve days. You will be a billionaire in 32 years, but it will take you more than 31,000 years to make a trillion dollars.
- A trillion seconds ago, civilization didn’t exist. A billion minutes ago, Trajan was emperor in Rome. A million hours ago, it was 1895, and Grover Cleveland was President of the United States.[Prove it…]
- A trillion $10 bills, taped end to end, would wrap around the Earth more than 380 times.[Prove it…]
- That’s a ton of cash—actually 1.1 million tons of it.[Prove it…]
- It would take more than 10,000 18-wheelers to transport one trillion $1 bills. Our national debt today would fill up 30 of the largest container ships ever constructed, each holding more than 4,100 containers full of cash.[Prove it…]
- You could spend $10 million a day and it would still take you 273 years to spend $1 trillion.[Prove it…]
[h=3]What is Innumeracy?[/h] In his bestselling book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, John Allan Paulos defines innumeracy as “an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance.â€
He tells the following story of how not intuitively understanding big numbers keeps us from getting the joke:
“An old married couple in their nineties contact a divorce lawyer, who pleads with them to stay together. “Why get divorced now after seventy years of marriage? Why not last it out? Why now?†The little old lady finally pipes up in a creaky voice: “We wanted to wait until the children were dead.â€
A feeling for what quantities or time spans are appropriate in various contexts is essential to getting the joke. Slipping between millions and billions or between billions and trillions should be in this sense equally funny, but it isn’t, because we too often lack an intuitive feeling for these numbers. Many educated people have little grasp of these numbers and are even unaware that a million is 1,000,000; a billion is 1,000,000,000; and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000.â€
[h=3]Driving up the debt:[/h] How big is 15 trillion dollars? 15 trillion $1 bills, laid end to end, side to side, would pave every interstate, highway, and country road in America—twice.[Prove it…]A feeling for what quantities or time spans are appropriate in various contexts is essential to getting the joke. Slipping between millions and billions or between billions and trillions should be in this sense equally funny, but it isn’t, because we too often lack an intuitive feeling for these numbers. Many educated people have little grasp of these numbers and are even unaware that a million is 1,000,000; a billion is 1,000,000,000; and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000.â€
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