Visualizing One Million
Even though it is often stressed that counting to precisely a million would be an exceedingly tedious task due to the time and concentration required, there are many ways to bring the number "down to size" in approximate quantities, ignoring irregularities or packing effects.
- Information: Not counting spaces, the text printed on 136 pages of an Encyclopædia Britannica, or 600 pages of pulp paperback fiction contains approximately one million characters.
- Length: There are one million millimeters in a kilometer, and roughly a million sixteenths of an inch in a mile. A typical car tire might rotate a million times in a 1,200-mile (1,900 km) trip, while the engine would do several times that number of revolutions.
- Fingers: If the width of a human finger is 2.2225 cm (7/8 inch), then a million fingers lined up would cover a distance of approximately 22 km (14 mi). If a person walks at a speed of 4 km/h, it would take them approximately five and a half hours to reach the end of the fingers.
- Area: A square a thousand objects or units on a side contains a million such objects or square units, so a million holes might be found in less than three square yards of window screen, or similarly, in about one half square foot (400–500 cm2) of bed sheet cloth. A city lot 70 by 100 feet is about a million square inches.
- Volume: The cube root of one million is only one hundred, so a million objects or cubic units is contained in a cube only a hundred objects or linear units on a side. A million grains of table salt or granulated sugar occupies only about 64 ml, slightly over a quarter of a cup, the volume of a cube one hundred grains on a side. One million cubic inches would be the volume of a small room only 8 1/3 feet long by 8 1/3 feet wide by 8 1/3 feet high.
- Mass: A million cubic millimeters (small droplets) of water would have a volume of (one litre) and a mass of one kilogram. A million millilitres or cubic centimetres (one cubic metre) of water has a mass of a million grams or one tonne.
- Weight: A million 80 milligram Honey bees would weigh the same as an 80 kg person.
- Landscape: A pyramidal shaped hill 600 feet (180 m) wide at the base and 100 feet (30 m) high would weigh about a million tons.
- Computer: A display resolution of 1,280 by 800 pixels contains 1,024,000 pixels.
- Money: A USD bill of any denomination weighs 1 gram. There are 454 grams in a pound. One million $1 bills would weigh in at 2,204.62 pounds, or just over 1 ton.
- Time: 1 million seconds is 11.57 days.
In Indian English, it is also expressed as 10 lakh or 10 Lac. Lakh is derived from 'laksh' for 100,000 in Sanskrit.
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Famous quotes containing the word million:
“Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)