Orders of magnitude (speed)

An 'order of magnitude' is a way of talking about how big something is. Think of it like a way of putting things in different size groups. It's like if you put all of your toys on the floor and then divided them into small piles. Each pile is a bigger size than the last one - that's one way of measuring orders of magnitude!

When it comes to speed, orders of magnitude help us measure how fast something is going - like if a car is driving at 60 miles per hour or 400 miles per hour. We measure the difference in speed between these two cars using orders of magnitude. In this example, both cars are travelling in the same direction, but one is going much faster than the other - so it's one order of magnitude faster than the other.