“Wondering how big, small, tall, long, fast, heavy, or old something is? The Measure of Things is a tool to help you understand physical quantities in terms of things you (or your audience) are already familiar with. Need a metaphor to emphasize a written measurement? Try including a comparison to the size of a whale, or the height of the Empire State Building, or the speed of a bullet train. Need to understand how big a metric or English unit really is? Try comparing them to real, tangible objects that you see everyday. Here are a few examples:
- Through adopting these measures, we can reduce our total on-hand inventory by 230 units and save approximately 12,000 cubic feet of space in the warehouse, which will free up about 200 linear feet of shelf space.
- A colony of brown bats can eat more than 3,360 fl oz of insects in a single evening.
- The winning horse stood ran at 0.099 miles per second.
These phrases are all ok, but they’re a little hard to understand — especially when they contain less intuitive measurements like miles per second. Try this instead:
- Through adopting these measures, we can reduce our total on-hand inventory by 230 units and save approximately 12,000 cubic feet of space in the warehouse — enough to empty 31 concrete trucks, which will free up about 200 linear feet of shelf space — that’s enough space to fit the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
- In a single night, a colony of brown bats can eat enough insects to fill up a bath tub three-fifths of the way.
- In the final straightaway, the winning horse galloped along at speeds one-and-a-half times that of Usain Bolt…”
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