#13: Mad About a Million

Million:  the number equivalent to the product of a thousand and a thousand; 1,000,000 or 10 to the 6th power

Two of my favorite pictures books are A Million Dots by Andrew Clements and How Much is a Million by David M. Schwartz.  Both books provide readers with several different ways to visualize a million.  This Math Minute post asks you to explore this fascinating number!

How can I spend my Math Minutes this week?

  • A Million Dots by Andrew Clements is a book that actually has 1,000,000 dots in it (along with many other fascinating facts!).  One million dots my seem kind of hard to imagine, but check the book out at the library and see for yourself!  Post a comment about something new you learned in the book!
  • Watch How Much is a Million and then figure out a problem involving a million.  Show your work and reasoning for your answer and then submit it to the EY Coordinator at your building.
    • How tall would a stack of one million pennies be?
    • If your leaky faucet dripped one million drops, how much wasted water would that be?
    • How long would it take you to count from 1 to 1,000,000 assuming that you counted one number every second for 8 hours a day?
    • How old would you be if you lived for 1,000,000 minutes?
    • How long will it take for your blink one million times?
    • Come up with your own “million problem”
  • Watch The Making of Hero and then do a little experimenting with stippling.  Try the activity shown in this video:  https://youtu.be/tMYI1wT0mB8

 

8 thoughts on “#13: Mad About a Million

  1. This comment is for the challenge: come up with your own “million problem”

    If you stacked a million 4 1/2 foot kids from Earth and to the moon, how many times could you do go back and forth, before you run out?

    1. You would have to do a 1,000,000*4.5 or 4 1/2

      A million times four equals four million, then times a million by 0.5 which equals 500,000. After you’ve done that, add it to the four million. Wait, how far is the moon from earth?!?!?! I need to talk to Siri. O.K it’s 1.22 billion feet. Can I have some help please?!?!

  2. How old would you be if you lived for 1,000,000 seconds?

    I started by finding out how many minutes are in a day by taking 60 * 24 which is 1,440.

    Next, I took 60 * 60 to find out how many seconds are in an hour which is 3,600.

    I took 3,600 * 24 to get 86,400 seconds in a day.

    I’m trying to get to one million seconds using 86,400. I started by guessing 15.

    86,400*15=1,296,000 (over)
    86,400*12=1,036,800 (over)
    86,400*9=777,600 (under)
    86,400*11=950,400 (under)

    My conclusion is that 1,000,000 seconds is somewhere between 11 and 12 days. So every 12 days, you’ve lived about 1,000,000 seconds.

  3. How long would it take to run a million miles?

    1.) I started out by seeing how long it takes to run 1 mile(about 10-8 minutes)

    2.) Then I multipled how many minutes by any number in the hundred thousnds untill I got to a million or close to a million( about 10*100,000=1,000,000)

    8*125,000=1,000,000
    9*111,112=1,000,008
    10*100,000=1,000,000

  4. How tall is a stack of 1,000,000 pennies?

    First I found out how thick a penny is (1.52 mm).

    Next I multiplied that by 1,000,000

    1.52 mm x 1,000,000 = 1,520,000 mm

    Then I did some conversion and got

    1,520,000 is equal to: 1520 m or 1.52 kilometers

  5. I think it’s just plain out crazy when using numbers like a million, but I’ll give it a try. What would be the capacity of a million-by-million stadium that’s square?

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