Very Big Numbers - economystified.blogspot.com
economystified
Unless you’re a financier accustomed to managing millions of
dollars at a time, or an astrophysicist who measures a ray of light's
path over billions of kilometers, you probably don’t have an easy
understanding of really large numbers.
Why would you though? In our daily lives, do we rarely have
occasion to even be able to count over a few thousand? We don’t buy
apples by the trillion, or measure our drapes by the quadrillionth of
an inch. We might vaguely know what the words mean, but without that
frequent usage, we don't understand them on the natural, automatic
level that we grasp smaller numbers.
So here's a little trick I'll pass along to you: to handle any
number of any size, you only need to be able to count up to "1000."
You can always just take humongous numbers, and scale them down to
good old "1000," and be whizzing around the number line in no time.
Here's the key to the "thousand trick." Imagine any large
magnitude base 10 value (aka an "-illion" number). A billion. A
trillion. Whatever.
Now visualize that "-illion" as this...
"1000"
...and think of all the "1"s, the single items of the above
integer, the smallest ranking place it has as the "-illion" that comes
before the "-illion" you are focusing on.
So for example, if we’re talking about “a billion dollars,”
picture in your head:
1000 things
But keep in mind each one of those “things” is actually a “one
million.” (It might help to envision 1000 poker chips, each chip
worth $1 million.)
Keeping this in mind, we can talk about the national debt in a
language that we are familiar with, and at a scale we intuitively
comprehend. Neat trick, huh?
In 2011, the Federal government is going to be somewhere to the
tune of one trillion, maybe one and a half trillion, dollars short as
it tries to pay to do everything a federal government does over the
course of a year. They'll have to borrow to make up that gap
difference…
Continue reading at: http://economystified.blogspot.com/2011/07/very-big-numbers.html