This came up in Economics class. Large Numbers in the News.

Zimbabwe's one hundred trillion dollar note.

The global recession has brought us a slew of numbers so large, with so many noughts attached, that it's getting difficult to put them into any kind of perspective. The Bank of England recently announced it was injecting up to £150 billion of new money into the British economy, an unimaginable amount - yet now we hear Barack Obama is proposing to splash out a further $1trn (one trillion dollars) to rescue Wall Street's floundering institutions. And even that's not as much as Britain's national debt has been recalculated at - £1.5trn - following the classification of Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland as public corporations.

Millions, billions, trillions - names most of us are familiar with, even if we can't specify the number of zeros. In January, Zimbabwe printed a dollar note with a number containing 11 zeros, only to further deflate its currency a month later. And it still doesn't match the Hungarian National Bank in 1946, which came up with the highest denomination banknote ever issued: a 100 quintillion (20 zeros) peng note.

To make any sense of what's going on (and how bad things really are), you need a feeling for quite how big these numbers are. So here's a brief guide, from zero right up to the biggest of them all. CLICK ON THIS LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/25/trillion-dollar-rescue-plan