Like Big Numbers? He’s Got a Million of Them

David Schwartz gets pensive when he hears children boast that they have collected “a million” baseball cards or have eaten “a billion” hamburgers.

When reading the newspaper, he ponders whether adults realize the enormity of 1.5 billion gallons of water, $4 billion worth of British fighter planes, 4 million latchkey children and nearly 2 million unwed house mates.

It quickly became apparent that children often grow up into adults who do not understand how much goes into a million, a billion and, especially, a trillion, Schwartz said.

“Innumeracy can be just as dangerous as illiteracy,” he said.

A personal mission ensued, with the end result being Schwartz’s first children’s book, titled, “How Much Is a Million?”

Schwartz, a former educator who is now a free-lance writer, realized that he was not alone in trying to express the greatness of large numbers. Clippings in his file range from an Iowa social studies class collecting 1 million bottle caps to President Reagan explaining the trillion-dollar deficit by equating it to a stack of $1,000 bills piled 67 miles high.

“Kids like big numbers. They’re kind of intrigued by them. They don’t have any way to understand them,” Schwartz said. “Adults tend to prefer to skip over big numbers. When they read an article, their eyes just sort of skim over the number and what they get out of that is ‘this is a big number.’

“I came up with different ways of viewing a million and a billion and a trillion” for his book by selecting examples in all dimensions: distance, area, volume and time.

For instance, the book says: “If a trillion kids stood on top of each other, they would reach way, way, way beyond the moon--beyond Mars and Jupiter too, and almost as far as Saturn’s rings.”

Or: “If you found a goldfish bowl large enough to hold a billion goldfish, it would be as big as a stadium.”