This misconception has plagued teachers for years, but it is easily remedied by continuous discussions about the concept of the value of zero. Unfortunately, my son's teacher simply marked the problem wrong and left it to me to discuss the concept with my son. I worried about children of parents who would have difficulty explaining the importance of this problem. This proposition would delight many mathematics educators who understand that teaching number sense is more important than just memorizing number facts. How numbers start tells us less than their length.
Eyes start to glaze over when confronted by numbers with lots of zeros.
MacNeal does an effective job describing that 225,000,000 does not look or sound much different from 225,000,000,000 to some people. MacNeal could have extended this problem to the reliance on and blind faith in the calculator. Many college students do not know that the display 225E6 means 225,000,000. MacNeal references the largest portion of his discussion on 'semantics' to Korzybski's general semantics. The Korzybskian influence is pervasive in many of his propositions, the following being the most conspicuous.