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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, if you 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. Our biggest problem at the moment is unemployment, which is roughly 8%. It has doubled over the last 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 exchange rate 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 “what are prime numbers?”.
A: I can help you there. Those are numbers that cannot be created by multiplying two whole numbers, 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 seconds altogether.
A: you’ll be a mathematician one day. words
numbers amount count hundreds thousands millions dozen couple pair double triple quadruple first second third fourth add plus minus deduct multiply divide roughly approximately equal several
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