Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health
care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the
number of giraffes in the world.
We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and
it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how
remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these
figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or
excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small?
With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew
Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a
sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a
numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help
us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same
skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in
the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe.
Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is
That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are
the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written,
and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you
humming again.
