The seven-year-old son had a sixty-nine math test. He said: “Don’t you take a zero point test before?” I said you can’t compare with me. Comparable or not? This is a question that is harder to answer than Hamlet’s question. All I can do is ask carefully: “Will this score make you uninterested in math?”
“No!” he said.
“Why?”
“I want to know what is the largest number, which is larger than ten thousand.”
“One hundred thousand is bigger than ten thousand, haven’t you learned it? One hundred million. ⋯⋯”
”How big is it?”
”One hundred thousand, one million, ten million, the same goes up.”
”How big?” If it’s hard to say anything, it’s called “100 million”. The old Chinese people used to call it “Daiwan” and “Juwan”, which all mean the same. Ten thousand and ten thousand are billions, and the billion is ten thousand times. br> “Anything bigger than 100 million? Is there anything else?”
“One billion, one hundred billion, trillion, trillion, and when trillion reaches another word, it is called’zhao’.”
He relaxes inch by inch. Two arms, wide eyes, seem to be saying to themselves: “Is there any bigger than trillion? Ten trillion, one hundred trillion, one thousand trillion, ten million trillion, did ten thousand trillion change another word?”
“‘Ten trillion’ is called’Jing’.” I actually don’t know if I’m right, I only know that my father taught this way when I was a child, and I even vaguely remember that numbers above 100 million have “decimal” “, “10,000 carry” and even “100 million carry” and other different expressions. Whether “100 million” is “one hundred thousand” or “ten thousand”, “mega” is “trillion” or “billion”, and “Beijing” is “ten trillion”, “billion” or “tera”, I am not Can’t tell. But his son seemed to have no time to study. He was only interested in the “name” of the larger number.
“How big is it?”
My answer is also the answer my father gave more than forty years ago: “That is the’Gang River Sand Number’.”
After a few days, I heard this in my ear I am not satisfied with the extended results of a math class, but at least the child has forgotten the small numbers like sixty-nine or one hundred-the son said to his five-year-old sister: “There is a very long country in a country called India The very long river is called the Ganges. How many sands are there in the Ganges? You can’t count them, it’s impossible to count them, so it means “Gang River Sands”, which means a lot. Understand?” This sister will be applied in a few minutes. When there is a dispute in the game, she said to her brother: “I will kick you to the count of Ganges!”