ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Orders of magnitude (one cubic millimetre to one cubic metre)

Okay kiddo, so orders of magnitude help us understand the size of things. We can use them to compare things that are really big or really small.

Let's start with something small, like a millimetre. Do you know how tiny that is? It's so small, you can barely even see it! Now imagine a cube that is one millimetre wide, one millimetre long, and one millimetre high. That's called a cubic millimetre. It's like a little cube the size of a grain of sand.

Now, let's go bigger. Imagine a cube that is one metre wide, one metre long, and one metre high. That's called a cubic metre. It's like a giant cube that's as tall as you are!

So, how many cubic millimetres can fit inside a cubic metre? A LOT! To be exact, there are one billion cubic millimetres in a cubic metre. That's a really big number, isn't it?

So, when we talk about orders of magnitude, we are talking about how much bigger or smaller something is compared to another thing. For example, a cubic metre is three orders of magnitude bigger than a cubic millimetre, because it's 1,000 times bigger!

I hope that helps you understand orders of magnitude a little bit better!