Editing 2091: Million, Billion, Trillion
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision | Your text | ||
Line 28: | Line 28: | ||
In other words, 1 billion objects in a country using the short-scale would be 1,000 million objects in a country using the long-scale; at the "next step", 1 trillion in the short-scale would be named 1 billion in the long-scale, despite the fact that the number of objects has remained the same. This difference between languages using the short-scale and the long-scale often causes confusion when translating articles with large numbers in them, as translators sometimes fail to change between short-scale and long-scale schemes, wrongly translating large numbers to incorrect values. | In other words, 1 billion objects in a country using the short-scale would be 1,000 million objects in a country using the long-scale; at the "next step", 1 trillion in the short-scale would be named 1 billion in the long-scale, despite the fact that the number of objects has remained the same. This difference between languages using the short-scale and the long-scale often causes confusion when translating articles with large numbers in them, as translators sometimes fail to change between short-scale and long-scale schemes, wrongly translating large numbers to incorrect values. | ||
− | The fact that such a staggering difference of terminology was able to exist and be almost completely unknown to many | + | The fact that such a staggering difference of terminology was able to exist and be almost completely unknown to many highlights Randall's point about the failure of human intuition in the discussion of extremely large numbers. |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== |