You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.

"Million, Billion, Trillion", by Randall Munroe, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

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You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.