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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Halfard.

This week we ask an Australian comedian to explain the system of imperial measurements.

But first I'm afraid we have more serious statistics to discuss.

The United Nations recently announced that in 2013 almost 8,000 civilians

and 1,000 members of the security forces had been killed in Iraq.

Estimates of how many people died overall since 2003 when Salam Hussein was deposed very widely.

A website called Iraq Bodycount gives a figure of 120,000.

The campaigning journalist John Pilger recently cited a number of a million.

We've looked at the difficulties of counting more dead before.

Many deaths will certainly go unreported while others may be counted twice.

But even so, the range of uncertainty in the case of Iraq seems to be very wide indeed.

So I spoke to Dr. Len Rangwala from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to guide us through the numbers.

Some people are just counting the immediate victims of acts of violence.

They just tally the number of death reports that come in from morgues and police stations

and from journalists that are attributing deaths to violent conflict

and generally come to something in the range of 120,000 people up to the present day.

However, not all deaths that occur in a conflict are caused by immediate acts of violence.

So how do we try and record those deaths?

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