Visualizing a trillion
May. 4th, 2009 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleThis is kind of alarming:
The Econ4u folks are dedicated to education Americans about all matters financial. To dramatize the importance of their mission, they put a poll into the field asking people how many millions are in a trillion. The results:
Q: How many times larger is a trillion than a million? Would you say…
One Thousand Times- 18%
Ten Thousand Times- 12%
One Hundred Thousand Times- 21%
One Million Times- 21%
Ten Million Times- 17%
Don’t Know- 12%
The correct answer is a million millions are in a trillion. But 79 percent of Americans got that wrong. And almost everyone got it wrong downward.
LOL. I was just thinking lately about ways to visualize a trillion.
Imagine a very small pebble, or alternately a large grain of sand, one millimeter on a side. (That's about 1/25th of an inch.)
If you place them side by side along the edge of a typical office desk, you have about a thousand pebbles.
If you completely cover the surface of the desk, you have about a million pebbles.
If you completely fill the volume of the desk, you have about a billion pebbles.
If you completely fill a 3,000 square foot home up to the very peak of the roof, you have about a trillion pebbles.
It's a big number, but not so big that you can't relate it to familiar objects.
Incidentally, it's also (very) roughly the total number of pixels in an uncompressed, high-resolution, feature length film.
The Econ4u folks are dedicated to education Americans about all matters financial. To dramatize the importance of their mission, they put a poll into the field asking people how many millions are in a trillion. The results:
Q: How many times larger is a trillion than a million? Would you say…
One Thousand Times- 18%
Ten Thousand Times- 12%
One Hundred Thousand Times- 21%
One Million Times- 21%
Ten Million Times- 17%
Don’t Know- 12%
The correct answer is a million millions are in a trillion. But 79 percent of Americans got that wrong. And almost everyone got it wrong downward.
LOL. I was just thinking lately about ways to visualize a trillion.
Imagine a very small pebble, or alternately a large grain of sand, one millimeter on a side. (That's about 1/25th of an inch.)
If you place them side by side along the edge of a typical office desk, you have about a thousand pebbles.
If you completely cover the surface of the desk, you have about a million pebbles.
If you completely fill the volume of the desk, you have about a billion pebbles.
If you completely fill a 3,000 square foot home up to the very peak of the roof, you have about a trillion pebbles.
It's a big number, but not so big that you can't relate it to familiar objects.
Incidentally, it's also (very) roughly the total number of pixels in an uncompressed, high-resolution, feature length film.
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-05 01:05 am (UTC)For instance, I ask people to think of a tube 1 square Ångstrom in cross-section by 5 light-years long. The volume of that tube is exactly 1.000 pint. Somehow the apposition of opposites helps communicate the point, especially (as in this example) if you can bring the result into human scale.