h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Time for another quick quiz.

It’s a well-known fact that journalists don’t like using standard units of measurement, as it’s difficult for their readership to comprehend the scale. Instead they use more everyday comparisons.

These are all extracts from articles written in The Sun, the most popular newspaper in the UK. Can you guess the missing words or phrases? Please submit *all 10*, and I’ll score them in a few days time. Coveted smiley prizes will be awarded.

Questions 4, 6 and 7 have two answers each - call them 4a & 4b, etc.

Over to you

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1. Irish Water has revealed leaks from our creaking pipes are enough to fill 18 ????? every day. {April 01, 2015}

2. A handful of troops are patrolling a province three times the size of ?????. {July 03, 2006}

3. A MASS of small volcanic rocks almost the size of ????? has been found floating off the coast of New Zealand. {August 13, 2012}

4. As Britain's first stealth sub, she gives off less noise than ????? thanks to her extraordinary amount of sound proofing - despite weighing as much as 975 ?????. {May 09, 2007}

5. Half of the posts will be created at the former Packard Electric plant in Tallaght, Dublin. The huge factory - the size of five ????? - closed last year with the loss of hundreds of jobs. {November 22, 1997}

6. Leading the way into the new age is Hong Kong's Bionic Tower. It will soar to 3,700ft (1,128m) - 140ft (43m) HIGHER than ?????. The foundations will plunge down 656ft (200m) - four times the height of ?????. {July 22, 2000}

7. If all the hair we grow was laid end-to-end it would stretch 950km (590miles) - about the distance from ????? to ?????. {May 07, 1998}

8. Britain's 22million office staff flush away nearly EIGHT GALLONS of water each a day by going to the toilet and washing their hands. In all they use 663million litres - enough to fill ????? seven times. {April 14, 2006}

9. THERE is an asteroid, the size of ????? hurtling through space at 70,000 mph. NASA boffins are keen to find out what would happen if it landed on planet Earth. {February 21, 2000}

10. ONLY one form of cancer has increased significantly since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a study showed yesterday. The horror in Russia on April 26, 1986, discharged more than 250 times the amount of radiation released by ?????. {April 19, 2006}.

1. Double-decker buses
2. Wales
3. Mount Everest
4. A sleeping whale
5. Football pitches
6. The CNN Tower in Toronto
7. London to Edinburgh
8. The O2 Arena, London
9. Hyde Park
10. The Hiroshima Atomic Bomb

Oops, didn't spot the part 2 questions -

4b Hippopotamuses
6b Nelson's Column

Since I'm not in the UK and am only passingly familiar with The Sun, I'll just take the generic 'Murican guesses for comparison. Maybe a few will coincide.

1. Olympic sized swimming pools.
2. Rhode Island
3. Manhattan
4. a)a running refrigerator b)elephants
5. White Houses
6. a)the Empire State Bldg. b) Statue of Liberty
7. Cincinnati, Ohio to New York City (actually 569 miles, Halifax, Nova Scotia to New York is closer at 596, but we wouldn't use a Canadian city for reference)
8. the Pentagon
9. Texas
10. Three Mile Island.

I couldn't conceivably use our go-to reference unit, a 747 for any of those listed above. I'm always baffled when things are described as weighing X times as much as a 747. Air craft are designed to have a particularly low density so using it as a reference to weight is inherently confusing.

Fascinating stuff, BG - thanks for that.

One I found after I'd posted the quiz is the unit of wasted public money. I'll post it for anyone to have a go at here, and would be interested in the US and other equivalents:

"Keep Britain Tidy boss Phil Barton said: 'It is time everyone realised the scale of the task local authorities are facing in keeping the places we call home clean.' Councils fork out £1billion a year on street cleaning. The charity says the cash could pay for 33,200 ?????."

It's gotta be cars. We usually gauge costs by cars


Rough guess, it should be a car selling for around $42,000. I think the new "affordable" Tesla Model 3s cost around that, maybe loaded. Or maybe some models of BMWs or Mercedes. We wouldn't gauge price by common domestic models oddly enough.

The answer was 'NHS Nurses'. It works on a number of levels with these pro-Brexit newspapers: outrage at the poor performance of the health service (explained through either lack of staff or too high a proportion of migrant workers), as well as trying to flatter any nurses reading, so they forget for a moment how poorly paid they are and don't go on strike.

They referred to nurses as 'angels' for many years - after a 1970s TV medical soap opera.

The other sector which gets this level of flattery from the press are the armed services, particularly our brave help-the-hero soldier boys. It's another group who get treated pretty shabbily through poor pay and poorly funded life-protecting equipment. The guys who lose limbs as a result are the bravest of the brave.

No more takers for this?

Nah, lash em out. Not going to try and improve on Gnomon.

Sorry - I had a really busy day when you posted this, and the answers were all so excellent...

The amount of money spent to remove Japanese Knotweed from the site of the London Olympic Games was enough to pay for 140 ?????.

The answers were, for the record:

1. Olympic-sized swimming pools

2. Wales.

3. Belgium

4. a) A baby dolphin, b) Double-decker buses

5. Football pitches

6. a) Mount Snowdon, b) Nelson's Column

7. Brighton to Aberdeen

8. The Royal Albert Hall

9. The Isle of Wight

10. The Hiroshima bomb

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Well, I can’t really say Baron Grim’s answers in their context were any more or less correct than Gnomon’s, so the smiley leaderboard is:

Gnomon; Baron Grim


Thanks for playing!

Shoot. I really should have come closer on 5. I was thinking in three dimensions, volume, rather than area. But American media is ALWAYS using football fields for measurement, either area or length. But you're never sure if they mean the 100 yards between end zones, or the full 140 yds between goal posts.

And I did expect 8. to be the RAH... ya know... because of that Beatles song.

It seems a bit incongruous to me - we are talking about a huge volume of sewage, after all. I can't imagine why the Royal Albert Hall should be an appropriate receptacle for it (unless of course if they're playing Mahler)

I sort of tune Mahler out when I hear his symphonies. There's only a little bit of one symphony that rings a bell when I hear it, so his symphonies are unmemorable. His lieder, though, is exquisite. Go figure!