Concept in Definition ABC

Most people are not familiar with very large numbers. Thus, it is easy to get confused with some of them. In the case of 1 trillion it is a confusing quantity in a double sense: because in it there are many zeros and because there are two different scales that use the term trillion and both are correct.

The short scale and the long scale

In the scale short a trillion is made up of one billion, which means it has a total of nine zeros (1,000,000,000). In contrast, on the long scale one trillion means one million million and therefore has a total of twelve zeros (1,000,000,000,000). The long scale is based on powers of one million and by this reason one trillion equals one million squared. In general terms, the short scale is used in Anglo-Saxon countries and the long scale is used in the rest of the countries.

The consequences of the two scales

The short scale is based on powers of one thousand and therefore one trillion is one thousand cubed or ten to the nine. The short system was officially adopted by Great Britain in 1974 and this fact produces a gap generational and older people think with the old scale (the long one) and the youngest already handle the short scale with

There is another aspect of the short scale that causes confusion: the word trillion suggests two because of the use of the prefix bi which means two but mathematically one trillion is 1000 to the power of 3. This peculiarity makes think to some that the long scale is more logic that cuts it.

The fact that 1 trillion is a figure with two possible interpretations creates confusion with relative frequency, since one trillion in Spanish is equal to one trillion in English (one trillion). Thus, when the data in the economy of the United States are discussed in countries with a different scale, this circumstance generates confusion and consequently it is necessary to make the conversion from one scale to the other.

The differences between one scale and another are not simply numerical, since it must not be forgotten that large numbers have a obvious psychological effect (a trillion in English seems like an amount greater than a billion in Spanish, but they are amounts identical).

On the other hand, the two scales express a paradox, since the math are exact but since there are two different ways of counting the accuracy it stops having the same meaning (an Englishman thinks that a billion is one quantity and a German thinks that it is a different quantity). The paradoxical question of some mathematical questions does not end here, since the number 0 is not interpreted by mathematicians in the same way, since for some it is a Natural number and for others it is not.

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