Is That a Big Number? Andrew C. A. Elliott

Is That a Big Number? – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780192554413,0192554417

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0198821220
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0198821229
• Author(s): Andrew C. A. Elliott

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.

Table contents:

Part 1 Counting Numbers

Part 2 Measuring Up

Part 3 The Numbers of Science

Part 4 Numbers in Public Life

Acknowledgements

Index

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