There are 800 bags of beans. Each bag contains 20,000 beans. How many beans are there in all?

16,000,000 beans total.

Step-by-step explanation:

Start with what you're given. Each bag has 20,000 beans, right?

There are, for some unknown, ungodly reason, 800 bags. Okay, great. It's a lot of bags of beans and I don't understand why there needs to be so much, but this is math. Most "related to real-world" problems in math don't make logical sense.

So we've established how many bags there are, and how many beans each bag has. You'll need to multiply those two together to get how many beans there are total. However, 20,000 times 800 is a very ridiculously large number and takes a lot of time. So, how do we make it easier to understand?

We focus on the most important parts.

800 and 20,000 are large numbers, but simple as well. The only digits are 8 and 2, followed by zeroes. Just multiply 8 times 2, and you get 16. Now add the number of zeroes from 800, and the number of zeroes from 20,000, and you'll end up with 6 zeroes.

So your answer should be 16 followed by 6 zeroes, or 16,000,000.

That's a lot of beans.