English Listening Practice: How to Clearly Express Large Numbers and Data

In the last lesson, I talked about giving specific information about data in charts and graphs. I'm going to focus on that today with the language you may need to do that. In this lesson, you'll focus on stating numbers and dates clearly, accurately, and using quantifiers such as 20% or a higher number of to comment on data. Lastly, you'll compare and rank using amount and degree words.

We usually think about data in terms of large numbers, so let's start there. Large numbers are a thousand, a million, a billion, and a trillion. At least that's the way they are in some areas of the world, like the United States. In other areas of the world, a billion is a bit different. Check the link in the resource section below for a map and list of countries that use this long-scale terminology. The abbreviations for millions and billions are m and b or bn. Say point if there's a decimal in this abbreviation. Notice that we do not put an s on these words when they're giving an actual amount.

However, when you're using the words in a general sense, like an approximation, just to mean a lot, you can use an s. If you need to say a specific number, here's how: 209, 1,417, 220,500, and 2. In most cases, we don't give a detailed specific number. We round the number, so 1,419 becomes 1,400. 10,880 becomes 11,000. When you don't use the specific amount, you can say about, around, or almost to show that you're giving an approximate amount.

We usually say dates as two pairs, for example, in 1995, in 2016. However, for the years between 2000 and 2010, we use the word thousand. Say the phrase or number and listen for the correct response. 4,000 people. In 1999. 420,650. 1,295,000. $50,000. From 2009 to 2010. More than 3,000,000. In 2018. In 1925. 12,000. 16.6 million. 100,000.