Poor befuddled readers of newspapers can’t be expected to
understand straightforward units of measurement so when it comes
to geographical area we journalists have a neat (where neat
means hackneyed) trick – compare the subject of the article to
things the reader might know. Traditionally this has been the
football pitch as in…”the Beckhams’ front porch is the size of
three football pitches”. Naturally this is no good for really
big things. For areas of Amazon rainforest felled, the
traditional unit of area is Wales. See this prime example… The
challenges here are immense and interlocking: an area the size
of Wales is chopped down every year; the burning of so many
trees adds hugely to the greenhouse gases linked to global
warming; global warming itself threatens to shift the weather
system and deny the forest the rain it needs to survive. When it
comes to Darfur there are two conventions for describing its
vastness. If writing for a British newspaper, it would be
expressed thus… Unamid is planning to build a