In the book, "Cheaper By the Dozen", Frank Gilbreth requires his son to write one million tick-marks on a large sheet of paper tacked to a wall, after the boy had casually used that number as an estimate. It took him many days of spare-time work to complete the task, and to gain a better appreciation of the magnitude of this number.
The book does not reveal exactly how many ticks per second the boy could write, nor how many hours per day he spent. If a person worked 24 hours a day at a rate of one tick per second, the task would consume more than eleven and a half days. One million seconds is 11.57 days, which is about three percent of a year or 40% of a lunar month (since there are about 2.5 million seconds between New Moons).
TIME: A million minutes is nearly two years (694.444 days, or about 1.9 years). A few people have actually lived one million hours (41666 days, or about 114 years).
A million days ago, Pharoh _____ was already mummified and ____ but ____ had not yet been born. (2740 years ago, or about 740 B.C.E.)
A million weeks ago, +++++ (19,165 years.)
A million months ago, +++++
LITERATURE
"Gone With the Wind" and "Atlas Shrugged" are novels of over
a thousand pages but, using a more conservative figure of 500 pages, a man
who reads a novel a week from the age of 21 would be well into his sixties
and probably retired before he had read one million pages.
MONEY:
Altho there has been much inflation since Gilbreth's time, a million
dollars is still considered a lot of money. Laid on top of one another, a
million dollar bills would +++++ . Laid end to
end (the long way), the bills would +++++. In pennies, stacked one on top
of the other, a million dollars would ++++. A million pennies would ++++
If the pennies were laid side by side, a single row of them would ....
(Nickels? Dimes? Quarters? Halves? Silver Dollars???)
PEOPLE: Cities of a million people are quite common, of course, but the population of the world would only fill five or six thousand of them. In some places, like ____, a million people live in a ___ square-mile area. In other places, like _____, a million people would be spread out over _____ square miles -- an area the size of ____. On the aversge, today, a million people occupy _____ of land. (This assumes that the world's __,000 million people are spread out uniformly over the ____ square miles of land of the six inhabited continents. If we include Antarctica, the figure becomes a million people in ____ square miles.)
LAND: A million acres is the size of _____. A million square miles is the size of _____ or ______. The contiguous 48 states occupy _____ square miles or _____ acres. In metric units, that's _____ square Kilometers or ____ hectares. Alaska adds about ___% to these numbers.
A million square inches is ______. A million square meters is, of course, one square Kilometer. Since a thousand cubic centimeters is a litre, a million cc would be one thousand litres (or about ____ gallons). A million fluid ounces is _____ ++++ swimming pool .
MILK: The American Dairy Association recommends drinking three half-pint (8-oz.) glasses of milk per day. (I wonder why?) If you follow their advice, by the time you have consumed a million ounces, I guarantee you will have lived a very long time -- ____ years, to be exact!
MASS: A million grams (1000 Kilograms) is called a metric "tonne", which is about 10% heavier than our 2000-pound "ton". A million ounces is ____ tons, or about the weight of ____. (???? 18-wheeler??) A million pounds is about the weight of a _______. (A pair of them would weigh nearly a million Kilograms.) A milliongrams of ____ ---> _____.???!!
STARS, ETC.: There are about one million stars visible in the _____ Many (invisible) stars are over one million light-years away, and some are as much as ____ LY from us. It takes light over two million minutes to reach us from the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. In one million light seconds, light could travel from our sun to the planet Pluto and back, ____ times.
VISE VERSA: Looking at things the other way round, there are exactly 31,536,000 seconds in a year (or _____ in a leap year). The number of seconds in a day is 86,400.
Windows in the Empire State Building??? In Skyscrapers .... in NYC??CELLS: A million cells ++++
DNA: One million of the genetic codons in the human genome would ++++ (???? How many per chromosome??) A million molecules of water .... A million atoms of Oxygen (paired as O2) ++++ (Keep you alive for only ???) Avogadro's # H2O 18 grams ~ 1/2 oz. A million electrons flowing thru a wire .... (not even register on ....) _____ electrons ==> one ampere, or about enough current to light a 100 watt bulb. A million volts .... (???? lightning bolt.) 1 M amps ??? 1 M watt == moderate-sized nuclear power station, or ___ very large cola-burners ... Approximately one million asteroids +++++
This pre-publication draft is Copyrighted by Bruce A. Martin/ADBC unlimited. All rights reserved!
Back to home page