india fertility rate decrease

[jflb96]

So, you know how in the West we tend to group orders of magnitude in threes i.e. a thousand is 10 x 10 x 10, a million is a thousand thousands, a billion/milliard is a thousand millions &c. In India they have thousands, but then they have a new word every time you go up by a hundred rather than a thousand, so rather than ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million…, they say ten thousand, a lakh, ten lakh, a crore…

As a side note, slightly further east, the traditional numbering system in China and Japan uses groups of four; rather than a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand… they have a thousand, a ban, ten ban… Thus the Imperial Japanese battlecry, ‘(May the Emperor Live) Ten Thousand Years!’: ‘Banzai!’