Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: April 02, 2021 12:34AM
I wanted to get students in computer classes to get some experience dealing with very large and very small numbers since numbers in the giga and nano ranges happen a lot in that field.
One of the exercises was how could you transport various amounts of US currency, in $100 bills. In particular, could you carry a million dollars by hand. That made the problem kind of interesting.
A US bank note is about 1 gram. It would take ten thousand hundred dollar bills to equal a million dollars, which would be ten thousand grams, or ten kilograms.
That's 22 pounds. Yeah, you could carry that say in a backpack, though it would tend to wear you down after a while.
How about a billion dollars. That would be a thousand million, so it would weigh 22,000 pounds. That's close to a full load on a tractor trailer truck.
And a trillion dollars would be 22,000,000 pounds. Google told me an average freight train of boxcars, 6,000 feet long, can haul about 20 million pounds. That means a trillion dollars in hundreds would slightly more than fill an average freight train.
For the record, the total value of all US currency in circulation is $1.2 trillion, according to NY Federal Reserve Bank document. I don't know how much of that is $100s, but I suspect it is less than one trillion dollars.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.htmlEdited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2021 12:36AM by Brother Of Jerry.