Order of magnitude

Imagine you're building a tower with blocks. If you start with one block, adding another block is twice as many blocks. But if you add another block to make three, it's not twice as many as two blocks. It's actually ten times as many, because 3 is one order of magnitude greater than 2.

Order of magnitude is a way of measuring how big or small something is compared to a reference value. It's like using a ruler to measure the height of different things. But instead of measuring in inches or centimeters, we're measuring in powers of ten.

For example, if we look at the difference between a millimeter and a meter, that's three orders of magnitude. A millimeter is 0.001 meters, or 10^-3 times smaller than a meter. On the other hand, a kilometer is 10^3 times larger than a meter, so it's one order of magnitude bigger.

Order of magnitude can be a useful tool for understanding how different things compare in size. It lets us quickly see which values are much larger or smaller than others, without having to do a lot of math.