Monday, 20 October 2014

Fun With Numbers: David Cameron

From The Daily Mail:

PM slashes the welfare cap to £23,000 a year: £300m in benefit savings 'will help fund millions of apprenticeships'

Woo hoo! I didn't realise that you could persuade employers to take on another apprentice for just £150 a year. [unfortunate decimal point now removed, h/t H in the comments]

That looks like very good value to me, why did nobody think of this before?
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UPDATE: Bayard in the comments insists that "millions" can mean "any number larger than one million", rather than "any number larger than two million" which is my interpretation, in which case, please revise that £150 figure up to £300 Or indeed £299.

7 comments:

Bayard said...

If you're going to be pedantic, anything over one million can be referred to as "millions".

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I think that "millions" must be at least two million.

You wouldn't call 13 or 14 "dozens", "dozens" means at least 24.

Bayard said...

Yes, but "kilograms" is anything over one kilogram, as in "1.01 kilograms"

Numbers are no longer pluralised, so we talk about "two million" when we used to talk about "two millions" but that doesn't mean that 1.01 million isn't "millions" in the same way as 1.01 kilograms is "kilograms". The plural is only definitive at leat two when we talk about something indivisible, like cows.

Anonymous said...

"The plural is only definitive at leat two when we talk about something indivisible, like cows."

THE PERKS OF ORDERING ONE OF OUR WHOLE OR HALF COWS

H said...

I suppose I'm just being obtuse, but surely £300 million divided by (say) two million is £150, not £1.50? Am I just being thick?

Bayard said...

p156, that isn't a cow, it hasn't got an udder.

Mark Wadsworth said...

H, my mistake, sorry, I have amended.