Can You Count to a Googol?

Children's Literature - Children's Literature

Counting to 100 is an accomplishment when you're a kindergartner. This book leads the reader to a number with one hundred zeros--a googol. Using multiples of ten, the pages proceed through the big numbers--thousand, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion and so on. The final page explains how a nine-year-old created the googol name for his mathematician uncle in the late 1930s. Context is provided for the numbers, but not every example is illuminating. One hundred thousand is represented by an illustration of one hundred baskets piled pyramid style with one thousand marshmallows in each basket. One million dollars stacked will fill a crate about this size! But what is THIS size? We learn when we get to an explanation at the end of the book. The crate would have to be 26 inches wide, 40 inches high and five feet long. Such concrete examples are necessary for upper elementary students to understand the meaning of large numbers. 2000, Albert Whitman, Ages 8 to 12, $14.95 and $6.95. Reviewer: Jacki Vawter

School Library Journal

Gr 2-4-The author illustrates how our number system builds by powers of 10 and helps develop a concept of what those numbers mean. The initial illustrations are silly: a girl balances one banana on her nose; a monkey balances 10 bananas using limbs and tail; 100 eagles pull a basket of children through the sky. A more realistic sequence illustrates millions to billions. A large wooden crate is loaded with 1,000,000 dollar bills; 10 of these crates are loaded onto a flatbed trailer (10 x $1,000,000 or $10,000,000); 10 of the trailers are loaded onto a barge ($100,000,000); and a harbor is filled with 10 barges ($1,000,000,000). The author explains that a googol, the number with 100 zeros, is too big to illustrate. "If you counted every grain of sand on all the worlds' beaches, and every drop of water in all the oceans, that wouldn't even be CLOSE to a GOOGOL." Children are reminded that numbers go on forever by a rocket speeding off into space, accompanied by a trail of zeros. The switch from fanciful to factual in these examples is somewhat jarring, but the pen-and-acrylic cartoons do adequately illustrate the growing numbers. Though David M. Schwartz's How Much Is a Million? (Lothrop, 1985), with its consistent playful tone and imaginative number illustrations, is still a preferable choice, Wells's model of building numbers could be a useful addition.-Adele Greenlee, Bethel College, St. Paul, MN Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|