On the Differences in the World
So I’ve known for a little while now that there are some places in the world that aren’t the United States, apparently my wife comes from such a place. It was a little bit of a shock, but I’m coming to terms with it. I think I’ll be ok. It also turns out that in some of these “countries” they may think about things in a way that isn’t the same way Americans do. Who knew?
One difference that I discovered a bit ago is that some don’t count continents in the same way. I learned that there are seven continents, but this is hotly contested on the world stage. The basic differences are whether or not America is one continent or two and the same dilemma for Eurasia. So depending on how you count them you’ve got 5 to 7 continents! I see the debate, although I kinda think it’s a little crazy to count North and South America as separate continents but then count Eurasia as one. I mean Europe and Asia are connected by the width of, well, a whole continent but the Americas by something slim enough to dig a canal through.
But I just found out that in many of these “countries” that aren’t the United States, a billion isn’t 1,000,000,000. In these countries a billion is what Americans would call a trillion! This seemed very odd to me - so you would say a thousand million or a hundred thousand million to mean an American billion or hundred billion. For some reason that is way wierder to me than the continent thing. It just seems like a lot of work to make big numbers, why’d they make a million a million, they could have called it a thousand thousand!
Ah, we learn new things every day. Like learning sponges we are.
February 27th, 2007 at 9:30 am
i hate other countries and their made up numbers and places. dont we have some button to make them go away?
February 27th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
I think Dubya is working on that.