I love extraordinary units. You know that I always make a fuss about including your units and showing your working because it is important that those marking your work should be able to follow your thought processes even if you make errors in logic. They are mostly more interested in how you think than whether you have remembered things.
I do get annoyed at descriptions of things as being ‘as long as two football pitches’ or ‘the size of a double decker bus’ because although they sometimes help with visualisation they are inlcined to make us lazy about what real masses and volumes mean. Sometimes, however, people come up with brilliant ideas; here is an example from today’s Telegraph.
A gentleman called Martin Locke caught a carp in a lake in France that was 42.6kg (that’s 94lbs in fisherman speak) which compares favourably with the UK record of 67lbs. It was observed that 94lbs is the same mass as Kylie Minogue so the Telegraph then produced a list of fish photographs with their celebrity equivalent in each case. Click through the pictures here, and don’t complain for too long that Romeo Beckham is not really a celebrity but merely the son of a pair of celebrities!
Comments