Numbers are a topical issue these days, with everyone trying to cope with the euro as our new currency, and there are several numbers in this week's extracts. In conventional written texts like these (not e-mails or SMS, which are less formal, so numbers are usually written as figures, i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.), small numbers are written as words, i.e. one, two, three, as well as twenty, thirty, forty, and so on, and hundred, thousand, million and billion also as words, especially when they are combined with small numbers, as in "four billion dollars".

Remember that the modern English (British and American) billion means "miliarda", i.e. one thousand million (many dictionaries are out of date). When speaking, it is always good to say numbers especially slowly, and with big numbers the sequence is exactly the same as in Slovak (forget "and"), so relax and take your time. Say phone numbers digit by digit, and "nula" can be "oh" /ou/ or "zero", so it's "oh nine one seven, six two four …", purely for example.