The Use of Benchmarks in the Popular Reporting of Commercial Shipping: Is the Titanic an appropriate measure to convey the size of a modern ship?

摘要

Popular science reports often make use of benchmarks to represent the size of objects in terms to which lay persons can relate. For length the reference may be to a number of London buses, height may be in multiples of the Eiffel Tower and area may be reported in numbers of football pitches or tennis courts. For a threedimensional object such as a ship the appropriate benchmark should be volumetric and this leads to an additional element of complexity when compared to simple linear measurements. A device often used for benchmarking the size of a ship is comparing it to the Titanic. For example, in reporting the heroic efforts of salvors to extract the stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia from the rocks off the island of Giglio, the BBC reported that the ship 'weighs twice as much as the Titanic.1 A later news report noted that the Costa Concordia 'weighs 114,000 tonnes'.2 While a quick reference to, for example, Wikipedia would seem to confirm that these statements are apparently valid, a simple error of understanding of word 'tonnage' means that neither statement is even approximately correct, let alone being anywhere near accurate.