Numbers everywhere
Think of all the numbers you use every day.
At school, you go into a room that probably has a number on the door.
Many times during the day, the teacher will tell you the number of a
page to turn to in a book. The teacher also gives you a number of pages
of homework to do. Perhaps you look at the numbers on the clock, to see
if it’s nearly time to go home!
At home, you check the clock again, to see if it’s time for your
favorite TV show. Then you turn to a number on the TV dial to get the
channel you want. If you decide to call up a friend, you need to know
the right telephone number. Perhaps you’ll look at the numbers on a
calendar to see how long it is until your birthday, or until a special
holiday or event. Before you go to bed, you may step onto a scale and
look at the numbers to see how much you weigh.
We use numbers to tell us all sorts of things.
Numbers tell us how hot or cold it is. If your mother takes your
temperature, the number the mercury in the thermometer goes to tells
your mother if you have a fever.
The numbers on a car’s speedometer tell you how fast you are going. And
the numbers on roadside signs tell you how fast you may go. Other
numbers on signs show how far you are from the place you’re going to.
All money stands for numbers. A dollar bill stands for a hundred
pennies, or twenty nickels, or ten dimes, or four quarters, or two
half-dollars. The numbers on signs in stores show how much things cost.
Think of all the games that are scored with numbers. In football,
baseball, basketball, and many other games, the side with the highest
number, or score, wins. When you play a game such as Monopoly, or
Parcheesi, the numbers you get by spinning a spinner or rolling dice
show you the number of spaces you may move.
Numbers are shown with numerals. And with only ten numerals, we can make
hundreds of millions of different numbers. There may be millions of
people in the city where you live, but they all have different telephone
numbers. The street you live on may be many miles long, but no other
house on that street has numerals that are arranged in exactly the same
way as the numerals on your house—your address. There are many
millions of people with cars in the state where you live, but no one
else has the same license plate number as the one on your family’s car.
As you become older, you will learn of more and more ways in which
numbers are used. Airplanes, automobiles, submarines, and many
other things could not be made or used without numbers. Numbers play a
big part in the construction of houses and buildings. Numbers help
scientists make wonderful new discoveries about all kinds of things. In
fact, numbers are so important that we’ve built giant computers that do
nothing but work with numbers to help us solve, in hours, problems that
would otherwise take weeks or even years!
You can probably think of many, many other ways we use numbers. It’s
truly a world full of numbers. In fact, it would be almost impossible
for us to get along without numbers!
