Billionaires versus the world
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Oxfam says that 62 people now own as much wealth as half of the world’s population. But is this really telling us anything meaningful? And how is it that this study shows that some of the world’s poorest people live in the United States?
What do you do with bored children on a bus? Rob Eastaway, author of ‘Maths on the go,’ gets three pupils to play a game on the Number 12 in south London.
Prime Minister David Cameron said this week that 22% of British Muslim women speak little or no English. He says that equates to 190,000. We look at the figures.
Plus, was the Hatton Garden Heist the biggest robbery ever? Is water more expensive than oil? And a new prime number is discovered.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a download of the Radio 4 edition of More or Less, which was first broadcast on Friday, the 22nd of January. |
| 0:08.0 | Enjoy. |
| 0:10.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers all around us. |
| 0:14.5 | Entertaining numbers, educational numbers and just occasionally entirely fictitious numbers. |
| 0:20.3 | This week is the entire world's wealth flowing to a secret base underneath a dormant volcano. |
| 0:25.6 | Can we make riding a bus, educational fun for children? |
| 0:29.2 | Our large numbers of British Muslim women unable to speak English and we also discuss the world's largest |
| 0:35.8 | prime and the country's largest burglary. |
| 0:39.3 | But first I know many listeners will be familiar with dragging small children around the supermarket, |
| 0:44.6 | waiting in line for that ride at Legoland, hearing the plaintiff cries of I'm bored. |
| 0:50.2 | You could shout at them or bribe them with sweets, but why not try to do something diverting and educational at the same time? |
| 0:57.9 | This is something that friend of the program Rob Easterway has been doing in a new book called Maths on the go. |
| 1:05.0 | While we've spent the week getting on with the business of scrutinizing and debunking the numbers in the news, |
| 1:10.0 | our reporter Charlotte McDonald has been on a bus with Rob to see if he really is up to entertaining a bunch of 11 year old children |
| 1:17.6 | armed with nothing but his mathematical skills. our journey at the beginning of the number 12 bus in South London. |
| 1:34.0 | Rob was keen to pick a game that not only got them practicing their math skills, |
| 1:41.0 | but got them to apply it to something topical. |
| 1:44.2 | He wanted them to carry out a little survey to find out the proportion of cyclists wearing |
| 1:48.4 | helmets to those who don't, but to make it more fun, he turned it into a competition. To test out his game, |
| 1:57.0 | we recruited some children. |
| 1:58.0 | Hello, my name is Carl Lotta and I am 11 years old. |
| 2:02.0 | Hi, my name is Daisy and I'm 10 years old. Hi, my name is Daisy and I'm 10 years old. |
... |
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