Very large and very small numbers are hard to work with and understand. Consider the meme below, which made its way around the internet in the mid-2010s:
Below is a table that describes some large numbers in words, standard decimal notation, and scientific notation. Notice that:
Numbers written in scientific notation always have one nonzero number to the left of the decimal, but can have as many numbers as desired/needed to the right of the decimal.
Keeping track of the number of decimal places in quantities can be useful for some estimation problems and in helping us to work with and think about large numbers.
Words like “million” and “billion” help us describe large numbers. These words have not been used consistently throughout time and across cultures to refer to the same numbers. We will use the convention described in the table below. Note that the table shows “ten million” and “hundred million”; “ten thousand”, “hundred thousand”, “ten billion”, etc. work similarly.
The amount of money needed to send all adults in the United States to a public college for four years. Assume there are about 258 million adults in the United States and that the cost of tuition and fees to a public college is about $25,000.
The number of words in the novel War and Peace. Note that using an internet search, we found that sample pages of an e-book version of War and Peace have about 300 words on each page. This e-book version is 1307 pages long.
You’ll need to be able to do the following things for this lesson. Rate how confident you are on a scale of 1 - 5 (1 = not confident and 5 = very confident).
