How many Olympic-size swimming pools fit in a Rhode Island football field?

When the news media needs to tell you about something that's really big (physically), they'll often use metaphors.

For example, when there's an oil spill or a flood or any event involving a large amount of liquid, writers and reporters will use a specific measure of volume: Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The idea is that people have a hard time visualizing things like 2,500 cubic metres of water. It's so much easier to imagine one Olympic-size swimming pool.

Similarly, the media often use football fields as a measurement of area, instead of saying "110 yards long by 65 yards wide."

To the 180's Matthew Lazin-Ryder, while it's fine to compare things to "one Olympic-size swimming pool'" or "one football field," the whole practice gets increasingly more useless as the numbers get bigger, like "3,200 Olympic-size swimming pools." If someone can't picture 2,500 cubic metres of water, how are they going to imagine multiples of pools?

What are we doing? What good does it do to tell someone 'oh you're having trouble picturing eight million cubic meters? Let me make it simpler for you! Just picture two thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools!'- Matthew Lazin-Ryder, The 180

To Matthew, what started as an attempt to make the scale of things more understandable, has just made things more confusing. A good example is the American coverage of the Fort McMurray fire. For some reason, American outlets like USA Today and CNN repeatedly measured the total area of the Fort Mac fire in terms of Rhode Islands. As in "the fire is nearly the size of Rhode Island" or "the fire is now larger than Rhode Island." 

I know they're talking to an American audience, but I'm highly skeptical that anyone outside of Rhode Island has a good understanding of the dimensions and surface area of Rhode Island. Unless you have cycled the perimeter of Rhode Island, I doubt you have an appreciation for the size of Rhode Island.- Matthew Lazin-Ryder, The 180

For more on the dangers of describing volume, area, and distance in terms of multiples of a non-standard measurement, click the PLAY button above now!