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What does it mean to be one in a million?
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Not in the greeting card sense,
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in the scientific sense,
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where one part per million
is a unit of measurement.
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Parts per million counts the number
of units of one substance
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per one million units of another.
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It can measure concentrations when
a small amount makes a big difference.
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For example, a concentration of just
35 ppm of carbon monoxide in the air
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is poisonous to us.
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We encounter measurements like this
pretty often,
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but because it's hard to conceptualize
really large numbers,
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it's difficult to wrap our brain around
what one part per million really means.
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So here are nine helpful ways
to visualize it.
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If you had 11,363 pianos-worth
of piano keys,
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one of those keys would be about
one part per million.
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So would a single granule of sugar
among 273 sugar cubes,
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one second in eleven and a half days,
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or four dots in the painting,
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"A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte."
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Your bath tub's capacity
is about 60 gallons,
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so seven drops of ink would be
one part per million.
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The English version of the Harry Potter
Series has 1,084,170 words,
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which makes "hippogriff" on page 221
of the Prisoner of Azkaban
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a little less than one part per million.
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A million kernels of corn
is about 1,250 ears,
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so one kernel in that truckload
would be one part per million.
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There are 10 million bricks in
the Empire State Building,
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so one part per million
would be a pile of just ten.
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And finally, 100 people worked together
to animate this video.
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Collectively, they have about 10 million
hairs on their heads.
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Pluck ten of those hairs,
and you have one in a million.