There’s something wonderfully human about the arbitrary objects we use to describe sizes that are hard to comprehend.
(Many of these provided on Twitter by @Gerald_Ashley, @PolemicTMM, @steveoneill77, @patrickjharris, @JohnHyde1982, @rorysutherland, @JaseClarke_CX, @Armo, @aden_76)
Height
Double-decker buses
Length
Football Pitches
Depth
Empire State Buildings
(or more recently, Shards)
Area
Tennis Courts (small)
Waleses or Belgiums (large)
Mass
Elephants
(The height of which are often compared to double-decker buses)
Volume (large)
Olympic swimming Pools
(NOT normal-sized swimming pools. That would be confusing.)
Volume (small)
(especially Toothpaste or Epoxy Filler)
Pea size
Golfball size
Word Count
Novels – usually War and Peace
(Particularly used for explaining the length of government reports)
Length of Document
The Magna Carta
The Gettysburg Address
Distance (short)
Household objects
Distance (medium)
Laps of the M25
Distance (long)
The Moon and back
Circumference of the earth
Orbits of the International Space Station
Thickness (small)
Human Hair
(Is there one for large thickness? Tree trunks? Lampposts?)
Sound
Pneumatic Drill
Jumbo Jet
Salaries
Nurses or footballers (depending on what point you’re trying to make)
Controversial wealth, tax payments, or spending
Hospitals
(e.g. Amazon’s missed tax payments would build 100 hospitals)
White Elephants
£Hundreds – Duck Houses
£Thousands – No.10 Refurbs
£Millions – Millennium Domes
£Billions – High-Speed Railways
Buying Power
Big Macs
Population
Coventries
Birminghams
Internet Speed
Movies per second
Car Speed
Horse Power.
(Because we all know what ninety 90 horses somehow merging into one massive powerful horse would be like)
Food Calorie intake
Bic Macs
Drink Calorie intake
Teaspoons of Sugar
Jumping
Body height
(e.g. a flea can jump 80 times it’s own height)
Baby Size
Types of fruit
Animal Intelligence
Human age
(e.g. A parrot is as smart as a three-year-old human)
Animal Brains
(Specifically types of nut, and specifically dinosaur brains)
Food
Subscriptions
(e.g. You can get this for the price of one cup of coffee per day )
Cups of Coffee
Rainfall
A normal month’s worth
Drunkenness
The legal limit
CO2 Emissions Reduction
Cars off the road
Power Generation
Homes
e.g. ‘the new wind farm could power 20,000 homes’
Figurative Phrases
Speed – as a speeding bullet
Heat – as hot as the sun
Happiness – happy as larry
Sickness – sick as a parrot
Drunkenness – as a skunk
Sobriety – as sober as a judge
Cunningness – as cunning as a fox
The ultimate measures
As fuck
Shitload
All photos from the brilliant https://unsplash.com
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