size of a million

1, 000, 000
Students can estimate answers, then calculate them.

1 million cm = 10 km, roughly 6.25 miles
1 million pence = £10, 000
1 million grains of salt = half a cup
1 miilion seconds = 11.57 days, less than two weeks
1 million burghers = 600 cows
1 million words is around 4000 pages of an average book
1 million cm^3 = 1 m^3 (a neat model for a million)

The Daily Mirror contains around 125, 000 words so a million words would be roughly 8 copies of this newspaper.

The Independent has around 130, 000 words (so 7.5 of these).

Man Utd attendance is around 76, 000. How many games to make a million?

Terry Pratchett's 'Johnny and the Bomb' (1996, with 272 pages) contains around 70, 500 words. How many readings of this to make a million words?

JK Rowling's 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' (2000, sales exceed 6.6 million and the book has 636 pages) has around 258, 600 words. How many readings of this to make a million words?

Stomach fluids have a million times as much hydrogen as water.

Molecules rotate at a million revolutions per second.

And the sheep?
There is a 1 in a million chance of a ewe having 5 lambs apparently.