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Topic : Comparison for something that's 251 million tons I'm sorry this isn't directly about writing but I don't know where I'd for this kind of question. I'm writing a paper and I'm trying to come - selfpublishingguru.com

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I'm sorry this isn't directly about writing but I don't know where I'd for this kind of question. I'm writing a paper and I'm trying to come up with a comparison that can tell my audience, to give them a better idea of how much 251 million tons of trash is. Does anyone have any ideas?


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Comparing to multiple smaller things is not nearly as evocative. You'd be hard-pressed to find an object of similar size, but we can always imagine one.
100 x 100 x 100 meters block of water is a million ton.
800 x 800 x 400 meters of water will be 256mln tons. Trash will occupy more as it's less dense. How much more? You're the expert.
Best if you can use an illustration.
Open Google Maps and find a location that is familiar to your audience. I picked the center of my city, the "old town" filled with antique buildings and relics of architecture.
Search area which is 800x800 or somehow a round multilple/divisor of that. I picked an 800x800 square, using Google Maps measure tool:

Find an aerial photo of that area, then find landmarks at the corners of your area. Draw the square in the respective perspective.
Extend the square by as much as the height would be, 400m is roughly half the side of the square. Make a cube. Adjust transparency and...

"It could cover the whole Old Town of Cracow with half a kilometer layer."
Let's pick a different location. Central Park in New York is about 800m wide, 4km long. So, divide the 400m height by 5. 80 meters layer, a tenth of the width...

"It would fill the Central Park area with a layer reaching over the tops of all but the highest of skyscrapers neighboring with it."
Adjust the volume for density, construct a cube of that volume at a familiar place, describe that cube.


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Try wolframalpha.com That is the kind of searches the Computational Knowledge Engine answers.
Specifically this link: www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=9.3%C3%9710^11+pounds&lk=1 (shows the weight of all humans on earth, etc.)

I put in "251 million tons" and searched at WolframAlpha and got that answer.

WolframAlpha Definition (from the site)

a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers— not by searching
the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection
of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.


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