France is the international measure of land area. Check out this google search and you will discover, lest any doubt remained, that it's hard to find WMD because Iraq is the size of France. You can't track down our sailors because Iran is three times the size of France. Darfur is variously two-thirds the size, or just plain the size, of France, which apparently makes a no-fly zone tricky. Libya is three times the size of France, Mauritania twice the size and so on.
I've no idea why newspapers do this. Is the size of France so intuitive, so ingrained in our minds that it leaps out as a comparator?
So the question remains - just how big is France? About the size of France, I suppose, but today's Independent has the answer. "France is a vast country - four times the land surface of England", it tells us.
So Iraq is four times the size of England, Iran is twelve times our size, Darfur three or four times, Libya twelve times and Mauritania six times our size. It makes you feel small, doesn't it?
Monday, 16 April 2007
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8 comments:
Australia is around 31 times your size.
I think that being small adds to the charm of the though- also, there is no way in the world your train network could cope with longer distances, the long drives would freak out the locals and would really put a dint in your short flying times to city break destinations.
It might if it were true, I suppose.
The "three times the size of France" claim might not have been the worst lie told by supporters of the Iraq War, but it was certainly such a lie all the same. Iraq is in fact slightly smaller than France, and about the size of Spain.
Claims about the sizes of other places relative to France are probably based on the false Iraq figure, and should if anything be recalculated accordingly, but really dismissed out of hand.
A slightly smaller unit of measurement that I've also heard of is the 'Wales', which in turn can be divided up into 'Football Pitches'. It turns out that France is 26.57 times the size of Wales, so sadly this does not allow the French to set up another branch of the metric system.
Of course, our cousins across the pond do things differently; area is measured in Texases; each Texas can be divided into 222 Rhode Islands, and each Rhode Island is a whopping 31 million football fields.
To confuse you, the football field is a different size to our football pitch.
small... but plucky :-)
Lengths can also be measured in red London buses, and height in Nelson's Columns. I haven't been bothered to work out what the square footage of Iraq or France is in terms of buses and columns.
I also fear that if this thread goes on for too long it will start to become like one of those light hearted exchange of letters in the bottom right hand corner of the Times letters page...
This article is hilarious Neil! I love the question of how intuitive the size of France is. I feel that you are way behind the times in this regard, as personally I measure most things in Frances. I think you should follow suit, as let's face it, it is likely that the EU will adopt this as the standard unit of measurement any day now.
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