情景口語：numbers數(shù)字

A：what’s the area of your country?

B: it’s not very big. It’s a little over half a million square kilometers.

A; that sounds quite big! How many people live there?

B; there are about 30 million people in my country. Most of them live in the north.

A: what’s the average income?

B; that’s the really hard to say. I think most people earn about two thousand dollars a month, ifyou convert the money from our currency into dollars.

A; so your country is fairly rich.

B: I think we are richer than most countries, but not as rich as countries in western Europe. Ourbiggest problem at the moment is unemployment, which is roughly 8%. It has doubled over thelast four years.

A: unemployment in my country is a fraction of that.

Intermediate

A: what’s “pi”?

B: that’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, I think.

A; I see. What is that ratio exactly?

B: it’s approximately 3.14, but the number continues forever. What’s the diameter of your circle?

A: it’s 10 centimeters, so the circumference should be 31.4 centimeters.

B; ok. My next problem is to convert 10000 british pounds into us dollars. What’s the exchangerate at the moment?

A: according to the newspaper, the exchange rate is 1.85 dollars to the pound.

B: that means that 10.000 pounds will buy me 18.500 dollars.

A: what’s the next question.

B; fractions. What’s a quarter and an eighth? That’s three-eights. Easy. The next question is “whatare prime numbers?”.

A: I can help you there. Those are numbers that cannot be created by multiplying two wholenumbers, apart from the number itself and 1, together.

B; so, 1,2 and 3 are prime numbers, but 4 isn’t because 2*2=4.

A: exactly. Anything else?

B; how many seconds in an hour? 60 seconds multiplied by 60 minutes equals 3600 secondsaltogether.

A: you’ll be a mathematician one day.