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Show TLiZ 13 G3J;ST a billion O. P. Austin, former chief bureau ' of statistics: I wonder if we realize ! when we talk of a billion dobars what i an i nrmous sum of money it means. We all know how rapidly an expert counter of coins will manipul te them. You can scarcely follow the motion of his fiu.ers as he shifts the coins from one pile to another and counts them. The treasury experts will count 4,000 silver dollars in an hour and keep it up all day long; but that is their limit. Working eight hours a day, then, an expert counter of coins will count $32,000 silver dollars in a day, but how long will it take him at that rate to count a million dollars? Thirty-one days. But that is only the beginnig of the measurement of great figures, for if this same man were to go on counting count-ing silver dollars at the same rate of speed for ten years he would find that he had only counted 100 millions of them, and that to count a billion dollars would require 102 years of steady work at the rate of eight hours per day during dur-ing every working day of every one of the 102 years. |