It may sound like a silly question, but if we want to make sense of data in the media, then whenever we hear numbers quoted, one of the first things we should be asking is - is that a big number? If someone’s spending money on you, they’re likely to want to make that figure sound as impressive as possible; on the other hand, if someone wants you to spend your money on them, they’ll want to make that figure sound as small as possible.

In this video, Mark explains some of the ways that big numbers can be made to sound small and small numbers can be made to sound big.