ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Telephone number (mathematics)

Alright kiddo, you know how you have a special way to call your best friend or grandma? You dial a certain group of numbers and then you get to talk to them on the phone!

Well, those special numbers are called telephone numbers. They are like an address for your phone, just like your house has an address so people can find it.

Now, let's talk about the numbers themselves. A phone number has 10 digits, right? That's because we use a system called base 10, which means we count using 10 different symbols: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Each digit in a phone number has a different meaning. The first three digits are called the area code. This tells us where the phone number is located. The next three digits are called the prefix, and they tell us what phone company the number belongs to. The last four digits are the unique part of the number that gets assigned to each phone line.

We can also do math with phone numbers! We can add them together, subtract them, multiply them, and divide them. But we usually don't do that because phone numbers are meant to be a way to contact someone, not to do math with.

So that's how a phone number works! It's like an address for your phone, with 10 digits that have different meanings. And we use a system called base 10 to count and do math with them.