Compare the quantity one billion to something tangible?

Answer 1

"Billion" may not be comprehensible, but it's certainly tangible. We'll try to relate it to

things in your everyday world:

-- the number of one-second tick-tocks of your clock in 31.7 years

-- the number of inches from the Anchorage, Alaska airport to the southern tip of South America ...

traveling the long way, via Asia and the South Pole

-- the number of times you have to put 41 drops of water into an olympic swimming

pool in order to fill it to 6-ft deep

-- at 80 characters per line and 55 lines on a page, the number of characters on

227,000 typed pages

-- the number of drops in 14,685 gallons of water

-- the number of 2010 pennies in 2,755.8 tons of pennies