Poll: How many millions are in a trillion?
I’m not sure which is worse: that only a fifth of the respondents knew the answer, or that two-thirds thought they knew, and were wrong.
This report presents the findings of a telephone survey conducted among a national probability sample of 1,001 adults comprising 501 men and 500 women 18 years of age and older, living in private households in the continental United States.
The question as asked is wrong. It says “How many times ‘larger’ than a million is a trillion?” The correct answer to the question asked is 999,999, which isn’t one of the options.
In many countries 10^9 is a milliard, 10^12 is a billion, 10^15 is a billiard, 10^18 is a trillion.
The question is fine — it asks how many times larger, not how much larger. And the poll was in the US, so the different nomenclature abroad is moot.