Big Numbers

1. Big Numbers Joe Hill Director of Math and Technology Rockingham County Public Schools

2. Shut your eyes and see if you can visualize these words. What do you see? Playground Swing sets, monkey bars, etc. Breakfast Pancakes, waffles, bacon, cereal, etc. Computer Monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc. One thousand 1,000 Unlike playground, breakfast, and computer, for one thousand most people only see how it is written.

3. Which is larger? 3 or 7

4. 3 and 7 aren�t really numbers. They�re just the symbols we use for the numbers. This is 3: �����

5. We use symbols to represent many things, not just numbers. John

6. Every number can be pictured in our mind. What does the number 6 look like to you? Shut your eyes and try to picture six�

7. Every number can be pictured in our mind. What does the number 8 look like to you? Shut your eyes and try to picture eight�

8. The larger numbers are, the more difficult it is to visualize them. What does the number 30 look like to you? Shut your eyes and try to picture thirty�.

9. The larger numbers are, the more difficult it is to visualize them. What does the number 1,000 look like to you? Shut your eyes and try to picture one thousand�.

10. One thousand is�. Approximately how many students who would fit on 20 school busses. The number of words you might find in a four page newsletter. How many feet long three football fields would be. How many fingers are present in a room that has 100 people in it.

11. Questions about a thousand� Have you done a thousand math problems this year? Yes, even if you only do 10 problems a day for 100 days of school. Have you been to school a thousand days since you started kindergarten? You will probably reach one thousand days of school during your 5th grade year. If you walked up 1,000 steps to get to the top floor of a building, how many floors would be in the building? Probably around 50

12. You have studied even larger numbers in math class How do you read this number? 123,456 One hundred twenty three thousand four hundred fifty six Which digit is in its ten-thousands place? 2 The numeral 1 is in which place? The hundred thousands place What does it look like??

13. One hundred thousand is� A little more than the number of seconds in a day. How many words are in a dictionary. Approximately the number of fingers you�d find today in Rockingham County Public Schools.

15. Let�s talk about a million: How do we write one million? 1,000,000 A million is a thousand thousands. What does it look like? How big is a million??

17. How long would it take you to count to a million? Suppose you could count one number every second. In one minute how high could you count? 60 In one hour how far would you get? 3,600 In one day, if you counted for ten hours, how high would you reach? 36,000 In ten days you�d get to? 360,000 It would take almost 28 days to reach one million.

18. How high is a stack of paper with one million sheets? One sheet of paper is too thin to measure. 500 sheets of paper make a ream and one ream is 2 inches tall. So 1,000 sheets would be how tall? 4 inches How tall would 10,000 sheets be? 40 inches How tall would 100,000 sheets be? 400 inches which is over 33 feet high How tall would 1,000,000 sheets be? 4,000 inches which is over 333 feet high It would be as long as a football field.

19. Would a million unifix cubes fill up a classroom? A unifix cube takes up about 1 cubic inch of room. A classroom might measure 10 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 30 feet long. If you converted this to inches you�d say the room was 120 inches tall, 240 inches wide, and 360 inches long. The volume, in cubic inches, is 120 x 240 x 360 = 10,368,000 cubic inches. So about ten million unifix cubes would fill the room.

20. Facts about a million: If you had a million dollars to spend in one year, you�d have to spend more than $2,700 every day. If you live a million hours you�ll be over 114 years old. If someone tells you �I�ve told you that a million times� don�t believe it! They would have had to have told you more often than 50 times a day for 50 years.

21. Questions about a million: About how many days are a million seconds? A little over 11 and a half days. Could a bank robber carry a million $1 bills from a bank? No way! It would weigh too much and the stack wouldn�t fit in a get-away car.

22. And after the millions come the billions�.. How do you write a billion? 1,000,000,000 A billion is a thousand million. What does a billion look like???

23. No one has ever counted to a billion� Earlier we determined that it would like over 28 days to count to a million. To count to a billion it would take 1,000 times as long, or 28,000 days. That�s almost 77 years of counting!

24. Facts about a billion: If you had a billion dollars to spend in one year, you�d have to spend more than 2 1/2 million dollars every day!. A stack of paper with a billion sheets in it would be over 63 miles high. A billion seconds is almost 32 years. So certainly no one has ever �told you something a billion times.�

25. Millions and Billions of Pennies!! Here�s a neat website that will show you what a thousand, million, and billion pennies would look like! http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/default.asp

26. So what have we learned? We understand numbers better when we can shut our eyes and visualize them. Even huge numbers like thousands, hundred thousands, and millions can be numbers we can picture in our minds. Big numbers are fascinating! Math is something you can enjoy studying millions of times (not really!).