temperature conversion

a powerpoint is here

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.

rice grains multiplied

one grain of rice weighs between 25mg and 33mg (0.025g and 0.033g)
½ cup of rice is an average portion
this is approximately 2.8 ounces.
1 oz = 28.35 grms.

how many grains of rice in an average portion?





a courtier, appearing to be modest when asked to state the reward he would like for a good deed, asked a king to have one grain of rice placed on the first square of a chessboard and then
two on the next,
four on the next and so on,
doubling for each next square

a chessboard is 8 by 8 squares







when the entire chessboard is filled, there would be

18, 446, 744, 073, 709, 551, 615 grains of rice (i.e. 2 to the power 64 minus 1).

this is 18, 446, 744, 069, 414, 584, 320 in the second half of the board and a mere 4, 294, 967, 295 grains in the first half of the board

in total, there would be a mass of around 534, 955, 578, 137 tonnes

the mass of the earth is around 5, 973, 600, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 tonnes
so it would need around 13,000 billion 'chessboard' fulls to make up one 'earth'