Hello and welcome to a more or less on the BBC World Service with a programme that's

driven by data and nourished by numbers, and I'm Tim Halfard.

Here at more or less we often start with the question, is that a big number? And often

the answer isn't quite what it first appears to be. This is largely because many numbers

like many of us were as teenagers, suffering from poor communication and widely misunderstood,

also odd or square. Now we're happy to shout about numbers and their

meaning until our tiny lungs burst, or at least until our allotted eight minutes and

59 seconds have passed. Luckily there are others who feel the same way.

Two such people are Carla Star, a science writer and Chip Heath, a meritor's professor

at Stanford University's Business School. Together they've written a book, Making

Numbers Count, all about how to better communicate numbers to the general public. We started

with a lovely little word you might not have heard of, subitise.

Subitising is being able to look at one, two, three, maybe four and just instinctively

know what quantity that is without any prior knowledge of math. It's just something

I think we all seem to be born with. And how big does a number have to get before we

can't subitise it anymore? The borderline seems to be four, but

if anything five or beyond and we are in counting mode, we are no longer in subitising mode

and so for that it takes that much more cognitive effort for us to be able to understand it.

So the bar is actually very low. This is unfortunate, as numbers are all around us, even more

so during the Covid pandemic. If we've learnt anything here on more or less over the

past couple of years, it's that numbers really influence our lives and also that they

can confuse the heck out of us.

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