Chinese Math

Once again I found myself with no idea what to blog about today, so I will follow my dad’s suggestion and write about math.

His first question: "If you took the entire population of China and divided it by the prime number that corresponds most closely to the population of Shanghai and then multiplied it by the log of the current Yuan/dollar exchange rate, what would the answer be?”

The answer:
C= Population of China=1.35 billion
P= closest prime to the population of Shanghai= 14,009,999
R= Current exchange rate= 6.28073
L=log of current exchange rate=1.83749

Answer=C*L/P=1,770,060.07 (Thanks to wolfram alpha for the data)

This lead to me having to explain what a log is, but anyways...

Other numbers of interest:

Hours I typically work in a week: 54
Price of my favourite stuffed buns in Beijing: Rmb 0.8
Number of new Chinese words I learned today: 3 (wind, door and tree)
Days I have been in China: 85
Pageviews on my blog so far (including the old blog): 619+475=1094
Days until I go to Inner Mongolia: 1
Number of e-mails I wrote today: 16
Current number of interns: 2 (William arrived today)
Number of digits in a Chinese phone number without area code: 8
Temperature today: 35 degrees with 51% humidity
Number of times I said “Sorry, do you speak English?” today: Too many to count...

Chinese numbers: I have never found a language with easier numbers than Chinese. As soon as you can count to 10, you can count to 100. 21 is literally 2*10, 1 (er shi yi) and all the numbers work like that.

yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi

Now you can do it too!

Chinese also has a hand gesture for every number...unfortunately they are not the same as the ASL ones (which I know).

As for the characters, I know the first 3...1 horizontal line, 2 horizontal lines and 3 horizontal lines. I guess it would be a little tedious to continue like that. Oh, and 10 is a cross...