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Imagine yourself in a classroom or at home. Take a moment to look around and count the various items in your vicinity—perhaps the number of chairs, the number of students present, or the quantity of stationery items like pens or pencils. The act of counting reveals that these quantities are represented by whole numbers—integral, non-fractional values.
For example, you might say, "I have 12 pencils," or "There are 30 people in this room." These complete counts confirm that we are indeed engaging with natural numbers, which are used for counting integers without any fractions or decimals.
Exploring the Infinite Sequence of Natural Numbers
The sequence of natural numbers begins with zero and increments by one. To visualize this, we can place these numbers on a number line: