Context for big numbers

This is a writing and communication assignment!

It is good to include numbers, to be specific, when you are writing. But sometimes those numbers may not mean much to your audience.

  • "The Bobcat fire in Angeles national forest is consuming 1,000 acres every 30 minutes". How big an area is 1,000 acres?
  • General Electric recently introduced a new offshore/ocean wind turbine: "a single Haliade-X can power up to 16,000 homes". How many are 16,000 homes? Do you have an idea how many homes there are in, say, Goshen?

Nowadays it is easy--by searching the Internet--to find statistics about all sorts of things. For example. Do some quick searching to find these numbers (in acres), and order them.

  • Average area of a farm in Indiana.
  • Area of the campus of Goshen College.
  • Area of a typical (average) U.S. house lot.
  • Area of Shanklin Park in Goshen.
  • Area of Goshen College's Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center

2020 Wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington

...Appear to be record numbers.

An article in The Guardian and one in the New York Times cite some numbers: (as of Sept 10, 2020):

For each area, find something which has a similar area, that lies within your experience, to compare it too.

Let's say it should be something "within a factor of two" close. If

  • The Creek Fire near Fresno, in Central California, remained completely uncontained, growing to nearly 167,000 acres by Thursday morning.
  • "The Bobcat fire in Angeles national forest is consuming 1,000 acres every 30 minutes".
  • "the Bear fire [California] ... expanded by about a quarter-million acres over a 24-hour period."
  • 2.5 million acres "destroyed in the latest batch of blazes" in California
  • “An estimated 330,000 acres of our state burned just in 24 hours yesterday,” said Gov. Jay Inslee [Washington state].
  • Roughly 46 million acres of land were burned by forest fires in Australia in 2019.

Which fraction of Washington and California has just burned? Which has had has had a larger fraction of its state recently suffering from fires? (For this you'll have to look up the area of each state, and then divide the total area of fires by the area of the state.)

The Insurance Information Institute has lots of interesting fire statistics for historical context as well.