Thursday, June 07, 2007

A Billion

Eli 5.10 brought home a paper scroll yesterday.

Over the last few months, he'd written every number from one to a thousand on pieces of paper about three inches wide. They'd all been taped together to create one piece of paper.

So we unrolled it.

When we were done, it was sixty-three feet long.

I wanted Eli to understand just how big numbers like "one million" and "one billion" were, so were figured out how long they would be if he had written them all down.

Here's the rough comparion: if "1,000" is sixty-three feet long, then "1,000,000" is twelve miles long. And "1,000,000,000" is twelve thousand miles long.

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