What makes a billion pounds

A billion has two definitions historically and in the UK we have switched what we mean by the term in living memory. There are two scales, a long and a short or sometimes referred to as the British and American, with a significant difference between them.

The long scale defines a billion as a million million whereas the short scale has it at a thousand million. The difficulty here is that headlines simplify government finances to an X vs Y transaction.

Money spent on foreign aid should be spent on British homeless, the right-wing press cries. Tax-shirking multinationals should be paying for social care, says the left. But that view forgets about one thing: politics. When people voted for the Conservative government, did they do so because they wanted Buckingham Palace to collapse so the NHS could be maintained at its current level of service despite an ageing population?

But there are plenty of cases in which it is a lot of money. Waste might be the most important one. He offers a series of tools to deal with really big quantities. These are the ones relevant here:. The WWF is dealing with trouble on a number of fronts including the illegal wildlife trade, climate change, pollution and general human encroachment on animal habitats. The same change has been done with a trillion.

In 1 million there are 10 lakhs and in 1 billion there are million. So, in 1 billion there are 10, lakhs. Or in other words, ten thousand lakhs make one billion. Billion Billion is a very large number that is 1 followed by 9 zeros. What is a Billion? Technique to Remember Zeroes in Billion 3.

Difference Between Billion, Million, and Trillion 4. Solved Examples on Billion 5. Even the smaller American billion is a huge number, and hard to imagine, so we have tried to find a way to show how big it is using some every day objects. The object we chose was a cheesy wotsit. We then wanted to describe how much space a billion cheesy wotsits would take up, so we decided to work out how many white vans it would take to transport this many wotsits if we just filled up the back of the vans with loose wotsits.

You'd need more vans if the wotsits were bagged, because you'd have to allow space for the packaging. How did we work this out? We had to guess a couple of things. First, we had to work out roughly how much space there is in the back of a white van.