{"id":57,"date":"2004-12-24T00:10:25","date_gmt":"2004-12-24T00:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=57"},"modified":"2004-12-24T00:10:25","modified_gmt":"2004-12-24T00:10:25","slug":"billions-of-em","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=57","title":{"rendered":"Billions of &#8217;em"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve long regretted the demise of the &#8216;British&#8217; billion 10<sup>12<\/sup>, a million million, in favour of the US version which is 10<sup>9<\/sup>, a thousand million. It means that the prefixes bi (billion), tri (trillion=million million million), quad (quadrillion) etc no longer make much sense. The change in the system is apparently due to the US adopting the French system (though France and French-speaking parts of North America changed again from 1948&#41;; international trade then did the rest. It&#8217;s all clearly explained at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidewords.org\/articles\/numbers.htm\" target=\"_blank\">A Zillion Troubles<\/a> <span style=\"font-style:italic; font-size: 10px;\">(thanks to <a style=\"font-size: 10px;\" href=\"http:\/\/gooseania.blogspot.com\/2004\/12\/ho-ho-ho.html\" target=\"_blank\">Gooseania<\/a> for the link)<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>I sometimes ask my students to think about the size of numbers like a million and a billion (either version) by asking them to guess how long it would take to count to them at the rate of one per second without a break. Then they work it out on a calculator and 99% of their guesses are wildly out \ud83d\ude15 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve long regretted the demise of the &#8216;British&#8217; billion 1012, a million million, in favour of the US version which is 109, a thousand million. It means that the prefixes bi (billion), tri (trillion=million million million), quad (quadrillion) etc no longer make much sense. The change in the system is apparently due to the US [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}