About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark, and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works! Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t. . . Where "A" is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P" is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r" is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n" is the number of compounding a year (1 in this case), and "t" is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).pg 11

Unanswered Questions in the Sunday News