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)
Wales’s or Belgium’s (large)

Mass
Elephants
(The height of which are often compared to double-decker buses)

Volume
Olympic swimming Pools
(NOT normal-sized swimming pools. That could be confusing)

Word Count
Novels – usually War and Peace
(Particularly used for explaining the length of government reports)

Distance (short)
Household objects

Distance (short)
(Also Red Squirrels, apparently)

Distance (long)
The Moon and back
Circumference of the earth
(Often used to explain the length of our inner body tubes)

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)

Buying Power
Big Macs

Population
Coventries

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)

Calorie intake
Bic Macs

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’

Soft Drink Calories
Teaspoons of Sugar
All photos from the brilliant https://unsplash.com
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