There is a whole lot of talk in the news about very big numbers these days, what with countries getting bailed out of debt and huge tonnages of carbon or ash getting put in the atmosphere and even large sums of money being won on lotteries.
I’m not sure that these big numbers mean a lot any more, so I find this method of comparing the big numbers to be handy:
- 1 second = 1 second (dur..)
- 10 seconds = 10 seconds (… obviously)
- 100 seconds = 1.6 minutes
- 1 thousand seconds = 16 minutes
- 10 thousand seconds = 2.7 hours
- 100 thousand seconds = 1.1 days
- 1 million seconds = 11.5 days
- 10 million seconds = 115 days
- 100 million seconds = 3.1 years (years!)
- 1 billion seconds = 31 years
- 1 trillion seconds = 31,709 years!
Now think what £6 billion (the amount of savings that our Government believes we need to make) looks like. If you were given one pound every second, it would take 186 years to get that much money.
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