The Measurement Shop

In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a test designed to measure the readability of a sample of English writing. The resulting number is an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to understand the text on a first reading. That is, if a passage has a fog index of 12, it has the reading level of a U.S. high school senior. The test was developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman, in 1952.

The fog index is generally used by people who want their writing to be read easily by a large segment of the population. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally require a fog index of less than 12. Texts that require a close-to-universal understanding generally require an index of less than 8.

The Gunning fog index can be calculated with the following algorithm:

1. Take a full passage that is around 100 words (do not omit any sentences).
2. Find the average sentence length (divide the number of words by the number of sentences).
3. Count words with three or more syllables (complex words), not including proper nouns (for example, Djibouti), familiar jargon or compound words, or common suffixes such as -es, -ed, or -ing as a syllable.
4. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words (ex., +13.37%, not simply + 0.1337)
5. Multiply the result by 0.4

The complete formula is as follows:

While the index is a good indication of reading difficulty, it still has limitations. Not all multisyllabic words are difficult. For example, the word “asparagus” is generally not considered to be a difficult word, even though it has four syllables.

More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.

This image was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The image reveals galaxy shapes that appear increasingly chaotic at each earlier epoch, as galaxies grew through accretion, collisions, and mergers. The galaxies range from the mature spirals and ellipticals in the foreground, to smaller, fainter, irregularly shaped galaxies, most of which are farther away, and therefore existed farther back in time. These smaller galaxies are considered the building blocks of the larger galaxies we see today.

The image shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe’s history. The closest galaxies seen in the foreground emitted their observed light about 1 billion years ago. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. This mosaic spans a slice of space that is equal to about a third of the diameter of the full Moon (10 arc minutes).

The new Hubble view highlights a wide variety of stages in the galaxy assembly process. Ultraviolet light taken by WFC3 shows the blue glow of hot, young stars in galaxies teeming with star birth. The orange light reveals the final buildup of massive galaxies about 8 to 10 billion years ago. The near-infrared light displays the red glow of very distant galaxies — in a few cases as far as 12 billion to 13 billion light-years away-whose light has been stretched, like a toy Slinky, from ultraviolet light to longer — wavelength infrared light due to the expansion of the universe.

In this ambitious use of Hubble’s observing time, astronomers used 100 Hubble orbits to make the ACS optical observations of this slice of the GOODS field and 104 orbits to make the WFC3 ultraviolet and near-infrared exposures. This set of unique new Hubble observations reveals galaxies to about 27th magnitude in brightness.

The International System of Units (SI) defines seven base units for a set of physical quantities of measure, or dimensions, that are used to define all other SI units, known as SI derived units.

The set of SI basic units consists of the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela, which are the units for length, mass, time, electrical current, temperature, quantity of substance, and luminous intensity, respectively.

The SI base quantities of measure form a set of linearly independent dimensions as required by dimensional analysis commonly employed in science and technology. However, in a given realization of these units they may well be interdependent, i.e., defined in terms of each other.

The names of all SI units are written in lowercase characters (e.g., meter, symbol: m), while the symbols of units named after persons are written with an initial capital letter (e.g., ampere, symbol: A).

In the United Kingdom, Wales, equal to 20,779 km² (8,023 sq mi), is used in phrases such as “an area the size of Wales” or “twice the area of Wales”. England is 6.5 times the size of Wales, and Scotland is four times the size of Wales. The Isle of Wight (380 km² or 147 sq mi) is commonly used for smaller areas. The British comedy show The Eleven O’Clock Show parodied the use of this measurement, by introducing a news article about an earthquake in Wales, stating that an area the size of Wales was affected.

In the United States, the areas of Rhode Island (1,545 sq mi/4,002 km², the smallest state and therefore a relatively easy threshold to reach), Texas (268,601 sq mi/742,293 km², commonly used due to its historic “larger than life” reputation), and less commonly used Alaska (656,425 sq mi/1,700,133 km²) are used in a similar fashion. Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf was approximately the size of Rhode Island until it broke up in 2002. Due to Rhode Island being a relatively small unit of measurement (and, perhaps, due to its area being 33% water), many comparisons to the size of Rhode Island are somewhat imprecise.^[17] The US Central Intelligence Agency uses Washington, D.C. as a comparison for city-sized objects.

In Canada, the standard unit of comparison is often Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province.

In Russia, France is often used as a comparison for regions of Siberia. This was so popular in Soviet time that the phrase “как две Франции” (twice the size of France) became a stock phrase to denote any large area.

The country of Belgium has also often been used when comparing areas, to the point where it has been regarded as a meme and where there is a website dedicated to notable areas which have been compared to that of Belgium.