- 6 weeks ago
Season 11 (1995-1996)
Season 12 (1996-1997)
Featured Book: How Much Is A Million? (by David M. Schwartz, pictures by Steven Kellogg, published by Lothrop Lee and Shepard Books, a division of William Morrow and Company)
Reviewed Books: Only One (by Marc Harshman, illustrated by Barbara Garrison, published by Cobblehill Books, an affiliate of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.)
One Hundred Hungry Ants (by Elinor J. Pinczes, illustrated by Bonnie MacKain, published by Houghton Mifflin Company)
How Many Stars In The Sky? (by Lenny Hort, paintings by James E. Ransome, published by Tambourine Books, a division of William Morrow and Company)
Original production funding provided by: Kellogg’s Cereal Company
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
PBS Viewers Like You
National Science Foundation
The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
Season 12 (1996-1997)
Featured Book: How Much Is A Million? (by David M. Schwartz, pictures by Steven Kellogg, published by Lothrop Lee and Shepard Books, a division of William Morrow and Company)
Reviewed Books: Only One (by Marc Harshman, illustrated by Barbara Garrison, published by Cobblehill Books, an affiliate of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.)
One Hundred Hungry Ants (by Elinor J. Pinczes, illustrated by Bonnie MacKain, published by Houghton Mifflin Company)
How Many Stars In The Sky? (by Lenny Hort, paintings by James E. Ransome, published by Tambourine Books, a division of William Morrow and Company)
Original production funding provided by: Kellogg’s Cereal Company
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
PBS Viewers Like You
National Science Foundation
The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Help all kids learn and grow with PBS Kids. Thank you for supporting your PBS station.
00:30Take a look. It's in a book.
01:00Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Have you ever wondered how many people there are in a big city?
01:15Take New York City, for example. Just look at all these people. Walk down any busy street during rush hour, it's like an ocean of people.
01:26Waves of them coming in every direction. Whenever I visit New York City, I just can't get over the numbers of people there are.
01:35Eight million people. No wonder the streets are so crowded. And of course, they're not all walking.
01:42I wonder how many trains, buses, and taxis it takes to get all of these people around the city.
01:50Ah, here's someone who might have some answers.
01:56Hey, excuse me. Could you tell me please how many people you've had in your cab today? In this week? In a year? In your whole career?
02:05Okay. Let me run a few numbers by you. This year, I've driven 23,200 trips in my cab. That's 46,400 times the doors open and close. You with me?
02:16Mm-hmm. Let's do the math. Now, I've been driving a cab for 10 years. In my career, that's almost a quarter of a million people who have driven in just my cab alone.
02:25Wow. Now, consider this. There are 11,787 Yettocabs in New York City. If they're all as busy as I am, and believe you me, they are, that's 273 million taxi trips in New York City every year.
02:39Wow. Now, when you start to consider those numbers, police. Taxi!
02:45Oh, that's me. Gotta go, Levi. See you later.
02:48Wow. That's amazing. Millions of people riding in taxis, buses and trains. Millions walking the streets of the city. Millions! It's hard to wrap your mind around a number that size. Try to imagine even one million of something. I mean, how much room does a million of something need? How far does it reach? What does a million look like? How much is a million?
03:14A million is a huge number. One of the biggest numbers. Near infinity. A lot more than a hydrate. There's a thousand times a thousand. There's more than a million animals in the world. A million is more people than you can fit in a stadium. There's more than a million stars in the sky. When I think of a million, I think of the hairs on my head.
03:40There's a million snowflakes in a blizzard. If I counted to a million, I'd be here all day. One plus one plus one times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten. Plus one plus one. A million is how many times my sisters get on my nerves. It's how many kisses I could give my mommy.
04:04One thing is for certain. A million of almost anything is a lot. And how do you know when you've got a million? Well, you could start counting. Or you could ask an expert. Meet Marvelosissimo, the mathematical magician. He's just the right wizard to unlock answers to that ticklish question. How much is a million?
04:32One, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million!
04:44How much is a million?
04:50By David M. Schwartz
04:52Pictures by Stephen Kellogg
04:56Read by Nick Sullivan
05:00If one million kids climbed onto one another's shoulders, they would be taller than the tallest buildings, higher than the highest mountains, and farther up than airplanes can fly.
05:20I never saw so many kids in my life.
05:24If you wanted to count from one to one million, it would take you about twenty-three days.
05:34If a goldfish bowl were big enough for a million goldfish, it would be large enough to hold a whale!
05:50Bristol!
05:54Here you have one hundred stars.
05:57If this book had a million tiny stars, they would fill seventy pages!
06:06Excuse me, sir, but how much is a billion?
06:14How big is a billion?
06:16Well, if a billion kids made a human tower, they would stand up past the moon!
06:25If you sat down to count from one to one billion, you would be counting for ninety-five years!
06:40Wow!
06:41If you found a goldfish bowl large enough to hold a billion goldfish, it would be as big as a stadium!
06:56Wow!
06:57If this book had a billion tiny stars, its pages spread side by side would stretch almost ten miles!
07:16Hey, how tremendous is a trillion?
07:19Hmm, how tremendous is a trillion?
07:25Well, if a trillion kids stood on top of each other, they would reach way, way, way beyond the moon!
07:37Beyond Mars and Jupiter too!
07:40And almost as far as Saturn's rings!
07:46Wow! One trillion kids!
07:50If you wanted to count from one to one trillion, it would take you almost two hundred thousand years!
08:03If you put a trillion goldfish in a goldfish bowl, the bowl would have to be as big as a city harbor!
08:13Wow!
08:14If you put a trillion of our stars onto a gigantic roll of paper, it would stretch all the way from New York to New Zealand!
08:28Hey, that's really far!
08:30You bet it is!
08:31Well, how much is a zillion?
08:45I just love enormous, gigantic, colossal numbers!
08:54Just saying their names tickles my brain!
08:57A million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion!
09:04I could go on forever!
09:05And believe it or not, it's pretty easy to imagine what those numbers represent!
09:10You just have to start with a small number, like ten!
09:16Apples!
09:19Ten juicy apples!
09:21A taste tempting treat!
09:23Put them in a sack!
09:25They're good enough to eat!
09:27Ten sacks of ten makes those apples more fun!
09:32We've got a hundred apples, and we've just begun!
09:37Ten baskets of a hundred, that's what's best!
09:42Keep a thousand apples in a shiny treasure chest!
09:48Ten chests of a thousand, that's first rate!
09:53Pile ten thousand apples in a packing crate!
09:58Now ten crates of ten thousand!
10:01What a piece of luck!
10:03One hundred thousand apples!
10:05Now inside this truck!
10:10Ten one hundred thousands!
10:12Count no higher!
10:14You've got a million apples in this high flyer!
10:18Now, it's one thing to imagine what a million would look like, but it's another to actually handle a million.
10:28People do it all the time.
10:29In fact, I know of a place where making a million happens every day, and in a very colorful way.
10:37At Benny and Smith factories like this one, Crayola crayons have been made for the past 93 years.
10:50The factory works 24 hours a day, 240 days a year, putting out millions of crayons.
10:58Every day, and all night long, rainbows of colors fill the factory machines.
11:19Colors like lime green, violet, and tickle me pink.
11:32To make crayons, you start with two ingredients.
11:35Pigment, like this cinnamon red.
11:38You also need paraffin, the waxy stuff that gives crayons their texture.
11:43The paraffin is poured into a cauldron, and melted down.
11:55Then it's mixed with the red pigment.
11:57The hot mix is poured into a bucket, and Mark pours them by hand into the molds.
12:11I make crayons on a flatbed mold machine.
12:14In one day, in eight hours, we make about 92,000 crayons.
12:18Those holes are filling with hot wax that will cool and make perfect crayons.
12:24Mark scrapes the extra wax off the top of the mold, and dumps it back into the hot wax mixture.
12:39Nothing is wasted.
12:45Next, crayon racks are fitted on top of the molds.
12:48And watch this.
12:51The machine hydraulically lifts 512 perfect cinnamon stick crayons into the racks.
13:06How do I feel about crayons?
13:07Oh, crayons are my life.
13:09I come here every day, I make crayons.
13:10I go home and I color.
13:14Across the floor, lots more colors are being made.
13:17But here, crayons are not hand-poured.
13:21They're strictly machine-powered.
13:26These rotary molds have hundreds of tiny jets that shoot hot-colored wax into the mold holes.
13:32The machine is called a rotary because the whole table rotates like a big wheel.
13:49It moves very slowly so that by the time the mold travels all the way around the table, the wax is cool and the crayons are perfectly formed.
14:01Now the crayons travel to the wrapping machine.
14:16Blue and colored paper labels wrap each crayon and give each color a name.
14:34Helen here has been wrapping crayons for 32 years.
14:53She's handled a few crayons in her time.
14:56Okay, I've worked here 32 years, plus I did 180,000 crayons a day on the two machines, which would be 530,000 crayons a week.
15:09That would be 2 million crayons a year.
15:12Well, Helen, that's more than 86 million crayons a year.
15:16But who's counting?
15:19Okay, now the crayons are ready to be packed in boxes.
15:29Crayons come in all sized boxes.
15:32I can remember my first box of 8 perfect crayons.
15:36Today, there are boxes of 16, 24, 48, 64, or 96 crayons.
15:44Betty is packing sleeves of crayons for the big box of 96.
15:50It's not as easy as it looks.
15:53This machine packs 57 sleeves per minute, and she's been packing crayons for 10 years.
16:01If it makes 57 a minute, I work 8 hours a day.
16:05If you're working 10 years of that, about 50 million, about 50 million, quite a few.
16:11When all the sleeves are filled, the boxes travel down the assembly line to the boxing machine.
16:22This robot flips the boxes open.
16:50And pushes the crayons into the big boxes.
16:57Here they are, ready to go to kids all over the world.
17:09Millions of them.
17:11Crayola crayon factories have made over 100 billion crayons.
17:22Now that's a big number.
17:26Sometimes, knowing the exact number of things is important.
17:36For example, you'll definitely want all 96 colors in your new box of crayons.
17:41But there are times when knowing the exact number isn't crucial.
17:44And those are the times when knowing how to estimate comes in handy.
17:48You may not know it, but you estimate all the time.
17:55About how much time do you need to get ready for school in the morning?
18:00Approximately how many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will fill you up at lunch?
18:07Roughly how many pizzas will you need to feed the class for your birthday party?
18:20Estimating comes in handy for professionals too.
18:23Take, for example, the people in charge of a huge football stadium.
18:27How do they feed and take care of thousands of hungry and thirsty football fans?
18:32Well, here are some folks who know the drill.
18:35Let's go Giants!
18:40Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey can hold over 77,000 people.
18:46But not every game brings in the same number of cheering fans.
18:50Sometimes there are only 50 or 60 or 70,000.
18:55The stadium officials never really know the exact number of people that will show up to a particular game.
19:01They have to estimate.
19:07Here's how they do it.
19:15First, they factor in the weather.
19:20Then, how well the team is playing.
19:22And finally, they look at last year's weekly attendance.
19:28This helps them predict how many people to expect on game day.
19:35At every game, tickets are carefully collected.
19:43The ticket boxes are brought beneath the stadium to the ticket counting room, where all the tickets are counted out by hand.
19:55When all the ticket stubs are counted, stadium officials know the exact number of people attending the game.
20:01Last year's records help them predict how many people to expect today.
20:06This helps the food managers figure out how much mustard, soda, and how many hot dogs they'll need to feed today's crowd.
20:18It's freezing out here today, and experienced vendors know what they'll need to defrost those ice-cold football fans.
20:33When it's really cold outside, we sell a lot of hot chocolate, we sell a lot of coffee, and we sell a lot of hot dogs per game.
20:47If it's cold, we could sell about 1,000 cups of hot chocolate a game.
20:52You got hot chocolate?
20:53This is only one of more than 40 food stands in the stadium.
20:57They can count on selling approximately 40,000 hot chocolates today.
21:02What do people eat on warmer days? Pretzels.
21:15If the weather is warm, we sell approximately 500 pretzels.
21:19Thank you, sir.
21:21500 pretzels times 40 food stands, that's 20,000 pretzels in one day.
21:28We deliver anywhere from 16,000 to 20,000 pretzels a week to this stadium.
21:35I estimate I delivered almost a million pretzels since I've been working for the company.
21:40Wow, that's a lot of pretzels.
21:44Last but not least, the bathrooms.
21:47How much paper does it take to accommodate thousands of people?
21:52At Giant Stadium, there are 72 bathrooms.
21:55At home, you'd use this size toilet paper.
21:58But here at the stadium, we use big rolls because we have lots of people.
22:04While you're in the stands enjoying the game,
22:06behind the scenes, the estimation experts keep you fed and comfortable.
22:11And once in a while, an exact number comes along that's fun to know about.
22:28The New York Public Library.
22:30Are you ready for this?
22:32There are over six million books in this building alone.
22:35You'll have to start soon if you want to make a dent in that reading list.
22:39In the meantime, here are three that you can really count on.
22:43But you don't have to take my word for it.
22:47There may be a million stars in the sky, but there's only one sky.
22:52There may be 30 pages in this book, but it's only one book.
22:56This book is called Only One.
22:59This book shows you how you get one thing out of lots of things.
23:04Like twelve eggs make only one dozen.
23:07Eleven cows, but only one herd.
23:11Four wheels, but only one wagon.
23:15Do you get it?
23:16Eight horses, but only one merry-go-round.
23:19It's kind of neat the way a lot of small things make one big thing.
23:24This is a really cool way to look at numbers.
23:27There may be a thousand people with my name, but there's only one me.
23:32My name is Carly, and this book is one in a million.
23:36Hi, I'm Jack.
23:38I read a very funny book called 100 Hungry Ants.
23:42Let me tell you about it.
23:45A hundred ants are going to a picnic.
23:48They are very hungry.
23:50They walk in a long, long line.
23:54The littlest ant says,
23:57We're going too slow.
24:00So they make two rows of fifty.
24:03But they're still not fast enough.
24:06So the littlest ant says,
24:09Let's try ten rows.
24:11Ten rows with ten ants hurrying to a picnic.
24:16Will they make it?
24:18I think you'll like this book about picnics, bugs, and numbers.
24:22I sure did.
24:24Hi.
24:25Do you think it's possible to count the stars in the sky?
24:28Well, this is a story about a boy who tried.
24:31It's called, How Many Stars in the Sky?
24:34It's late at night.
24:36The boy in the story is wide awake, wondering how many stars in the sky.
24:42He goes into his backyard.
24:45His dad sees him and tries to help him count the stars.
24:49They go to the city for a different view.
24:52They can't see the sky.
24:54The lights are too bright.
24:59Then they decide to go to the country.
25:02There are so many stars.
25:04Before they can finish counting, they fall asleep.
25:08I'm Eric.
25:09And if I were going to count stars, I would use a telescope.
25:13What would you do?
25:15There are millions everywhere.
25:20Whether it's people in the big cities,
25:24fishes in the oceans,
25:28or stars in the night sky.
25:32Sometimes big numbers may seem as unreachable as those stars,
25:36but don't be afraid to ask how many.
25:39There are ways to count just about everything that exists in our world.
25:46Or out of it.
25:48I'll see you next time.
26:06I can go anywhere.
26:19I can be anywhere.
26:27Today's Reading Rainbow books are
26:29How Much is a Million? by David M. Schwartz.
26:33Pictures by Stephen Kellogg.
26:35Published by Lothrop Lee and Shepherd Books.
26:37A division of William Morrow and Company.
26:44One Hundred Hungry Ants.
26:46By Eleanor Pences.
26:47Illustrated by Bonnie McCain.
26:49Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
26:55Only One.
26:56By Mark Harshman.
26:58Illustrated by Barbara Garrison.
27:00Published by Cobble Hill Books.
27:02An affiliate of Dutton Children's Books.
27:04A division of Penguin Books USA.
27:10How Many Stars in the Sky.
27:13By Lenny Hort.
27:14Paintings by James E. Ransom.
27:16Published by Tambourine Books.
27:18A division of William Morrow and Company.
27:21Those are watching him now.
27:24The sky of Mmmm.
27:26Kindness.
27:27We are married.
27:28More films per week.
27:29digestive reminds round.
27:30Olden to the Mole is aнемel價 cube.
27:31Chat community,
27:32so we can't show you that freeform.
27:33Danke.
27:34How Can You Locate.
27:36New and Thirty one just keep th 법ing.
27:37For us lived in the Sky Birch.
27:38Two.
27:39The räンジャons first found cleaned and現.
27:41The one sow.
27:42The one sock renewal.
27:43The tomorrow month wasn't � JENNINGS.