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American Morning, the most news in the morning. Weekdays 6 ET.

OK, a million dollars is a lot of money, a billion dollars is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion. Johnny Curnon is here with me.

A little gut-check, just how big a trillion dollars is? It’s got twelve zeros, that’s easy to understand. Or think of it this way. One trillion one dollar bills stacked tight would reach nearly 68,000 miles into space, one third of the way to the moon. Republicans are hardly over the moon.

“ If you’d started spending the day that Jesus was born, and you spend a million dollars every single day, you still wouldn’t have spent a trillion dollars. ”

“We checked the senator’s numbers with noted mathematician John Allen Paulos. A million dollars a day for two thousand years is only about three quarters of a trillion dollars. It’s, it’s a number no matter how you slice it. ”

So let’s slice it another way.

A million seconds is about 11.5 days, a billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. Well, people tend to lump them together perhaps because they rhyme.

Million, billion, the national debt tops 10 trillion. After a 700 billion dollar bank rescue, and proposed 800 billion dollar stimulus, are we numb?

“Number itself can be parsed 'number' or 'numb-er' and maybe in this case the latter is a better pronunciation. ”

“One million dollars?! ”

Just like Dr. Evil discovered in the movie Austin Powers, times have changed. Back in 1993,

“Immediate package of jobs, investments of over 30 billion dollars”, he didn’t get it.

Just last year, “So the whole purpose of the stimulus package is to have something robust enough to make a difference”.

President Bush signed an emergency economic stimulus of a now paltry 168 billion dollars. And now, “A trillion, a trillion, a trillion, a trillion dollars.” Can we afford it?

“The Gross National Product is, you know, 12 trillion dollars. Whatever it is, we do have a big economy that may not be as vibrant as it was, but it’s still a powerful economic engine. So knock on wood, we’ll see what happens. ”

Knock on wood, we’ll see what happens. The stimulus probably won’t reach a trillion, but consider this, all the financial interventions, the loans, the guarantees, the bailouts, the rescues, there’re now more than 7 trillion dollars. Johnny Curon, 7 trillion, let’s turn around, wrap our heads around that.

VOCABULARY

1.       gut-check                   a test of one's nerve, courage, or determination

2.       stack                         v.堆叠n.堆, 一堆, 堆栈            

3.       noted                         adj.著名的     

4.       lump together                vt.放在一起,组合在一起             

5.       national debt                  n.国债            

6.       parse                          vt.解析n.分列    

7.       paltry                         adj.不足取的, 无价值的, 琐碎的, 下贱的     

8.       Gross National Product          n.国民生产总值(=GNP)                     

9.       knock on wood                  vi. 但愿老走这种好运  摸摸木头          

10.    guarantees                      n.抵押品       

11.    bailout                         A rescue from financial difficulties:紧急融资