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 arent really numbers. Theyre just the
symbols we use for the numbers.

• This is 3
•   

This is 7       
5
We use symbols to represent many things, not just
numbers.
Your teacher

• John

Chocolate Cookies
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

The number of legs on a spider
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.

The number of chairs in some classrooms.
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.

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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 youd find
  today in Rockingham County Public Schools.

14
This drawing is 100 millimeters long and 100
millimeters wide, so there are 100 x 100 10,000
tiny squares in all. Ten of these drawings would
make 10 x 10,000 100,000 tiny squares.
15
Lets 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??

16
Remember that this drawing has 10,000 tiny
squares in all. If we had 100 of these drawings,
wed have 100 x 10,000 1,000,000 tiny squares.
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 youd 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 youd 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, youd have to spend more than 2,700 every
  day.
• If you live a million hours youll be over 114
  years old.
• If someone tells you Ive told you that a
  million times dont 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
  wouldnt 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.
• Thats almost 77 years of counting!

24
Facts about a billion

• If you had a billion dollars to spend in one
  year, youd 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!!

• Heres 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!).