Issue 116 – October 2022
HOW BIG ARE BEARS? PERSPECTIVE MAKES IT PLAIN
One bear “is roughly the size of a side-by-side refrigerator, and would fill nearly a full row of airplane seats.” – Katmai National Park and Preserve
Brown bears are big. I mean, BIG. You probably have to guess at the size, but would you guess “seven times the average American adult”?
That’s Chunk, at 1,200 pounds the runner-up in the annual Fat Bear Week, October 5 to 11 this year. The winner, Bear 747 (shown here), is one of the largest bears in the world, weighing as much as 1,400 pounds (636 kg).
Fat Bear Week is the amusing fan-vote elimination tournament run by Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve. The competition began in 2014 as Fat Bear Tuesday, and celebrates the park bears’ success getting ready for winter hibernation. It also secretly encourages conservation awareness.
One bear “takes up nearly an entire king-size mattress by himself.” Another, after a summer of gorging on salmon, “is roughly the size of a side-by-side refrigerator, and would fill nearly a full row of airplane seats."
Big bears eat a lot. How much? “A dominant bear in a quality fishing spot can catch up to 30 sockeye salmon in a day. That’s roughly 150 pounds of fish — enough to make 600 sushi rolls.”
The comparisons illustrate the value of giving some perspective to support understanding. You may not be talking about bears, but whatever large or small numbers you have will benefit from context.
Here are some other terrific examples, unrelated to bears but showing the value of perspective:
Eight million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean every year, “the equivalent of a garbage truck’s–worth every minute. And the rate is increasing. If nothing changes, the amount of plastic sloshing around the ocean could double in 10 years. By 2050, that mass of plastic could exceed the weight of all the fish in the sea.” – Ryan Stuart in Hakai Magazine
“The diaper was smaller than a playing card, and it swallowed her.” – Kelley Benham French as reported by Jacqui Banaszynski for Nieman Storyboard
“One photo of a tire yard in California… is particularly striking for its scale and its waste. [Edward] Burtynsky pointed out that more than 32 million tires have been dumped here since 1932; the rubber at the bottom flattened like pancakes by the weight of those on top. Three months after he shot that photo, the tires caught fire with flames reaching 2,800 feet high — doubling the height of the CN Tower, for perspective.” – Sue Carter in the Toronto Star
“Jamaica’s population is 2.9 million. Roughly the size of the city of Chicago. [Jamaican athletes’] ability to sweep the women’s 100M final in Olympic record-setting times is truly astonishing, given their population is less than 1% of that of America.” – Emmanuel Acho on Twitter
“If you laid the red plastic tags that we were putting on our products side-by-side, you could go from Vancouver to St. John’s and back to Vancouver [from the west side of Canada to the east and back, for my American friends]. That’s a lot of plastic.” – Teresa Schoonings, senior director of sustainability for Bimbo Canada on their cardboard bread tag
“In the tropics, ocean temperatures skyrocketed from 25 degrees Celsius — similar to today’s oceans — to perhaps upwards of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). This is the temperature of a hot tub, or…'very hot soup.' Multicellular life simply can’t exist in this sort of globe-spanning Jacuzzi.” – Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World
Have you spotted any other helpful analogies that did a great job of explaining a large or small number? Please hit "reply" and share.
Related reading:
Avoid “number soup” and make it easier for readers to digest numbers
Ann Wylie shows how to figure out comparisons
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