Topic: Can you tell I'm bored?
uk1971's photo
Sun 11/30/08 03:31 PM
I've been giving myself little writing projects lately—trying to just write what I want without thinking too hard about it. Here's an intro to place value:

Take a look at the sentence below. It is a very famous sentence in the English language:


"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

This sentence is famous because it has all 26 letters of the alphabet in it. Yep, that's right. Every letter from A to Z is in that sentence at least once. Can you find all 26 letters of the alphabet in the sentence?

Of course, some of the letters in the sentence repeat. There are 2 T's, 2 H's, 3 E's, 2 U's, 2 R's, and 4 O's. But every letter of the alphabet is in that sentence at least once.
Now think about all the words you know. You might not think you know very many words. But actually, if you're reading this right now, you probably know thousands of different words! And to make all of those thousands of different words, you only need to use 26 different letters—the 26 letters of the alphabet!
Don't believe me? Well, just think of all the words you could make with the letters E, T, A, and B. Here are some of the words I can make using just those 4 letters:


A BE AT BAT TAB TEA BEE TEE


EAT ATE BET BEAT BEET EBB ABET

That's 15 words. And to make those 15 words I only needed 4 different letters. Think of how many words someone could make from 26 different letters. Well, it's a lot!

We can make just about all of the words in the English language using only the 26 letters of the alphabet. In mathematics, we can make just about all of the numbers using only 10 special numbers called digits. Here are the 10 digits we use in mathematics:


0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Using just those 10 digits, I can make all of these numbers:


4 152 99 3,678 8 521 2,222


215 654,301 70,953 540 123,456

And I could make a lot more! How many different numbers can you make in, say, 30 seconds?

Okay, so here's the good part. Take a look at the 3 words below. These are 3 of the words I made earlier:


TEA EAT ATE

Do you notice something special about these words? If you said that the words all have the same letters, but they each have a different meaning, you would be so right! All the words have an A, an E, and a T. But in each word the letters are in a different order. And each word has a different meaning.
Now, take a look at the numbers I made above. There are 3 of them that look alike. Here they are:


152 521 215

Do you notice something special about those numbers? The numbers all have the same digits, but they each have a different meaning. All the numbers have a 1, a 2, and a 5. But in each number the digits are in a different order. And each number has a different meaning.
When you don't know the meaning of a word, like ebb or abet, you can ask your mom or dad or your teacher what the word means. Or, even better, you can look up the word in a dictionary to help you figure out what the word means.
In mathematics, we use a special system to tell us what numbers mean. And that system is called . . . dah duh duh DAH . . .! Place value.

ohwell bigsmile :banana:

KAY KAY 's photo
Sun 11/30/08 03:36 PM
Your not the only one bored!!!

yawn yawn yawn yawn

no photo
Sun 11/30/08 03:40 PM
Tom! Are you going to have examples of American English compared to the British english?laugh

Lily0923's photo
Sun 11/30/08 03:42 PM
Great now I'm bored....asleep asleep