Odd Squad
Zeros are Disappearing
Clip: Season 1 | 2m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
Olive and Otto from Odd Squad confer with Polly Graph for leads on the disappearing zeros.
Olive and Otto from Odd Squad confer with Polly Graph for leads on the disappearing zeros.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Odd Squad
Zeros are Disappearing
Clip: Season 1 | 2m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
Olive and Otto from Odd Squad confer with Polly Graph for leads on the disappearing zeros.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Odd Squad
Odd Squad is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
- (O'Brien): Preparing to squishinate.
Squishinating.
- But we're not ready yet!
- Sorry.
- Yeah!
- Another turn!
- Woo!
- Hey, Olive.
Hey, Otto.
Here's your usual.
- (Olive): Thanks, Polly.
- (slurping): Ahh, perfect.
- Say, there's some odd stuff going on around town.
Have any graphs that might help us out?
-Let me see.
This is a bar graph showing how much money I make selling hot chocolate.
Haven't made much today.
I'm never, ever gonna get that pony, - Maybe because the price of your hot chocolate has gone down.
- Five cents?
But it used to say 50 cents!
5-0!
What happened to the 0?
- (Olive): Same thing that's happening to zeroes all around town.
They're disappearing.
(gasping) - NO-- --NOO...Wait.
Why is that a problem?
Zero stands for nothing, so nothing is the matter.
Uh-uh.
A 0 only means nothing when it's by itself.
Take Polly's marshmallows, for example.
This is 1,000 marshmallows.
Right now, there's a 1 in the thousands place and a 0 in the hundreds place, the tens place and in the ones place.
- (Otto): Mm-hmm.
But take away one 0, the 1 moves to the hundreds place, and it becomes 100.
But lose one more 0, the 1 moves to the tens place.
That's 10.
Take way the last 0, that's just 1.
Which is why the ball of gum shrunk from 1,000 wads of gum to 1 wad.
But why would zeroes just disappear?
- You know you gotta pay for that, right?
Support for PBS provided by:















