It can sometimes be difficult to visualize what very large numbers look like. In this post I have created several examples to help put the number 1 million into context.
One million dots on a poster
Here I have created a poster containing 1 million dots. There is a link to download a pdf of the poster below. For a bit of extra fun, I have made one of the dots on the poster red. See if you can find it!
One million steps
One excellent way of understanding how much one million is is to think about in terms of distance. If one normal walking step is 0.75 metres, 1 million steps is 750 km. So, if we were to walk 1 million steps, this would take us from London to Zurich in Switzerland (or from New York to Detroit).
One million seconds
We can also think of 1 million in terms of time. 1 million seconds is equivalent to over 11 days. Imagine trying to count to a million!?
One million grains of rice
A single grain of rice weighs around 0.02 grams (yes, I did actually measure this!). Therefore, 1,000,000 grains weighs 20,000 grams (or 20 kg). What does that amount of rice look like? Well wonder no more, here is a photo of me holding five 4 kg bags of rice. That would be enough to make around 200 portions of rice.
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