How many is a billion?

In 1992, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as ``The Nation's Report Card'', presented the following question:

In this five option multiple-choice question, 22% of American eighth graders got the correct answer.  We could analyze in purely statistical terms how much better than wild guessing this is, but it's clearly not much.  In other words, the results essentially meant that the entire nation's soon-to-enter high school students did not understand the difference between a million and a billion.

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