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If... by David J Smith Book Review

If: A Mind-bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers by David J. Smith
Illustrations by Steve Adams
Publisher: Kids Can Press
Release Date: August 1, 2014

Numbers are big. Huge. Some are so astronomically big that it is almost impossible to imagine them. And so David Smith tries to narrow it down. Imagine if all the world's wealth were 100 gold coins. How would those 100 coins be distributed throughout the world? Imagine that the planets were the sizes of balls. Taking things like population, the size of the universe, history, Smith scales them down to a number that is easier to comprehend.

Although written for children, I think this book has a very universal appeal, because the truth is, even adults have a hard time imagining how big our universe really is. Numbers are big and this book does a terrific job of making those numbers manageable.

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