There’s something wonderfully human about the arbitrary objects we use to describe sizes that are hard to comprehend.
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
(Many of these provided on Twitter by @steveoneill77, @patrickjharris, @Gerald_Ashley, @PolemicTMM, @JohnHyde1982, @rorysutherland, @JaseClarke_CX, @Armo, @aden_76)
All photos from the brilliant https://unsplash.com
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