challenge

[Don Shepherd]

(06-22-2018 10:40 AM)grsbanks Wrote:  Very true. The way I would say 9999 (and I suspect nearly everyone living in the UK and Ireland would) is "Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine."

Most people in the United States would probably say that too. But many would omit "the" and that would be acceptable.

As a math teacher of kids who are first learning about operations that include decimal numbers (grades 6 or 7), we teach them to let the word "and" represent the decimal point when they pronounce numbers. So pronunciation of integers will never have the word "and," and pronunciation of decimal numbers will have exactly one "and", pronounced at the decimal point.

so 9,999 is "nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine"
18.7 is "eighteen and seven tenths"
4,566.173 is "four thousand five hundred sixty-six and one hundred seventy-three thousandths"

Most kids catch on to this pretty quickly, and when they later go into the real world and hear people say "six hundred and seventy-five", they still get it.