What is a Billion

[kowan]

The next time you hear a politician use the

word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about

whether you want the 'politicians' spending

YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,

but one advertising agency did a good job of

putting that figure into some perspective in

one of its releases.





A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.



B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.



C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were

living in the Stone Age.



D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.



E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and

20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.



While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at New Orleans It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division



Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans . Interesting number, what does it mean?



A. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of

New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you

each get $516,528.



B. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in

New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.



C. Or, if you are a family of four, your family

gets $2,066,012.



Washington, D.C . HELLO!!! ... Are all your calculators broken??

[OLS108]

I Do belive one Billion $US isnt the same as one Billion AUS.

AUS is same as the UK one million Millions

However the US use One thousand MIllions...


I could be wrong however.

Dave

[vy_storm]

I Do belive one Billion $US isnt the same as one Billion AUS.

AUS is same as the UK one million Millions

However the US use One thousand MIllions...


I could be wrong however.

Dave

A billion is a billion mate, in anyone's language.

Orders of magnitude (numbers) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[AttaBoy]

Billion is a company who makes Wireless routers, modems and other network hardware.

[VLDavo]

and to think bill gates is worth like 100 billions or some stupid number like that

[AttaBoy]

and to think bill gates is worth like 100 billions or some stupid number like that

He's worth half that - 50 something billion.

[YMY-88U]

nah bill gates is around the 70 billion area now id say, unless his losing it all

[Wombat]

Yep, "1 billion" is 1000 million...always has been. There was a brief idea many years back that it should be "1 million million", but that is such a vast number that it has no real use, and is too long a step above the last major number, "one million".

How about the woman whose kid was told at school that it was "impossible" to write out the numbers from 1 to 1 million in word form ("one, two, three, four", etc)as it would take longer than a human lifetime. The kids mother sat down and typed it all out on some vast number of pages of paper, and got into the record books about it.

[AttaBoy]

Yep, "1 billion" is 1000 million...always has been. There was a brief idea many years back that it should be "1 million million", but that is such a vast number that it has no real use, and is too long a step above the last major number, "one million".

How about the woman whose kid was told at school that it was "impossible" to write out the numbers from 1 to 1 million in word form ("one, two, three, four", etc)as it would take longer than a human lifetime. The kids mother sat down and typed it all out on some vast number of pages of paper, and got into the record books about it.

What a waste of life.

[s_ikari2015]

1 million million (or a thousand billion) is commonly known as a trillion.

Of course you can always look at "bytes"

Kilobyte (thousand) = 1 000
Megabyte (million) = 1 000 000
Gigabyte (billion) = 1 000 000 000
Terabyte (trillion) = 1 000 000 000 000
Petabyte (quadrillion) = 1 000 000 000 000 000
Exabyte (quintillion) = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000
Zettabyte (sextillion) = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
Yottabyte (septillion) = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
Xonabyte (octillion) = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
(No more bytes sizes as of yet - that is there are no prefixes made by ISO yet.)

It's weird how the quadrillion has 5 sets of "0's" instead of four, as a "quad" would suggest.... and that remains true for the rest of the numbers. Of course that's one way to remember the names I guess.