OT: Is there no requirement for government ministers to be numerate?

[Roger Mills]

Anyone hear the item on BBC R4's 'Today' Programme this morning (Tues

6th May) about the abduction of the Nigerian school girls?

In seeking to explain the difficulty in finding them, Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds referred to the forested area where their captors are thought to be holding them as "sixty-thousand kilometres square".

I can only assume that he meant sixty-thousand square kilometres - which would equate to a square of 245 Km or a circle of diameter 276 Km.

I fear that he would be somewhat challenged if he attempted to draw a

60,000 Km square on a map of Nigeria seeing that the circumference of the Earth is only about 40,000!

Am I being totally unreasonable in expecting him to know the difference? After all, he does apparently have a degree in "Urban Estate Surveying - whatever that is!

[Adrian]

Perhaps he said "kilometres squared"?

[Chris Hogg]

It's a common incompetence not confined to politicians. Journalists in particular never know the difference between square kilometers and kilometers square.

[Brian Gaff]

Urban Estate Surveying? I've never heard of it, surely surveying is Surveying, the only difference is there are more buildings in urban areas. Brian

[Roger Mills]

Well, if he did, it was a very silent 'd'!

[Max Demian]

Well it might be written km^2, but it isn't said like that, any more than you pronounce m^2 'metres squared'.

[Roger Mills]

Apparently obtained at Trent University - which was previously a Poly.

[I still chuckle about the Goodies' spoof University Challenge sketch in which Tim Brooke-Taylor introduced himself by saying "My name is Tim, and I'm reading Travel Brochures at the University of Lunn - formerly Lunn Poly".]

[charles]

As evidenced by a survey carried out by consultants to our borough council, "rural surveying" means sitting in an office looking at Google Maps

[spuorgelgoog]

selling dusters door-to-door?

Owain

[Robin]

No. But I think you are being a bit unreasonable in making so much of him using "square kilometres" rather than "kilometres squared" when quite possibly reading from a brief he had only 20 minutes before the interview in which (as has already been pointed out) it was almost certainly typed as "km2". After all, even BBC interviewers and newsreaders have been known to mis-speak.

[Jabba]

Roger Mills scribbled...

[dennis]

That is how its said.

[Andrew Mawson]

Some months ago, our local BBC South East News reader reported that a robber had stolen 'thousands of pounds of jewels' - I pointed out that finding him would be easy as he'd be the one with the hernia, and perhaps she had meant 'thousands of pounds WORTH of jewels'.

Give credit to the Beeb - they acknowledged their mistake :)

Andrew

[PeterC]

Ah - (sixty-thousand kilometres)^2