Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

I'm Charlotte McDonald.

This week, a more than half of the world's fishing vessels in the South China Sea.

But first, one of our listeners got in touch to question a stat that made headlines in a lot of the UK newspapers.

UK Women Top List of World's Biggest Female Binge Drinkers report fines.

I'm not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of my fellow country women.

The headline came from an OECD report which found that women in Britain were top of the list

for heavy episodic drinking among member nations, that's 38 mainly high-income countries.

And lawyer listener Isabel wasn't the only one who thought the stats needed a long hard look.

My name is John Holmes, I'm a stats needed a long hard look.

My name is John Holmes.

I'm a professor of alcohol policy

at the University of Sheffield's School of Medicine

and Population Health.

John had his suspicions about the stat and looking at the sources he saw that there

were quite a lot of apples and pairs, presumably fermented, being compared.

There's two kind of things really in play here. One is how each country defines a unit of alcohol or as some countries call it a standard drink.

And this can range from 8 grams of alcohol in a unit in the UK up to 14 grams of

alcohol in the US. It's a bit odd to talk about grams of alcohol but this is how

alcohol stats are worked out. In the UK a unit

that's 8 grams equates roughly to a small glass of wine or half a pint of beer but in the

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