Good morning!

It’s my stop on the Earth is Big blog tour and I have the amazing author, Steve Tomecek, has stopped by to talk to you all! How lucky are we?

Earth is big! (compared to a frog) 
Earth is small! (when it’s hiding in a galaxy)

And that’s not all. Earth is wet and dry, hot and cold, round and jagged, fast and slow. You get the idea. It depends how you look at it!

Get to know our planet in a whole new way by comparing it to a huge variety of other incredible things – from tiny particles to giant star clusters. Did you know soap bubbles are some of the roundest objects in the universe? Or that we humans are totally outnumbered by chickens? Or that the driest desert on Earth isn’t scorching but freezing? Tour some of the most extreme places on the planet and beyond it, take a look at life forms from bacteria to elephants to redwood trees and explore what makes our planet the perfect home for us. 

***

What are standards and why are they critical when it comes to measurement? 

Earth Is Big is full of all types of measurements about our planet and objects found on and around it. If you stop and think about it, we use lots of different measurements in our daily lives. When you bake a cake, you need to carefully measure the different ingredients to make sure that it comes out just right. When you buy shoes, you need to know how big your feet are so the shoes are not too loose or too tight. And when you are driving down the road in a car, you need to know how fast you are going so you don’t get a speeding ticket!  

Over the years scientists have come up with hundreds of ways to measure things including the size, weight, temperature, age, how fast things are moving and even how much water they have in them. These different types of measurement didn’t come about all at once though. They evolved over time as new properties of matter were discovered and new technologies were developed. While they may seem very different from each other, the one thing that all types of measurements have in common is something called a “standard”. A standard is a unit of measurement that everyone agrees with. One example is the “meter” which is the standard unit of length in the metric system. The meter was introduced in the 1790s and was originally calculated to be 1/10,000,000^th the distance between the North Pole and the equator. This distance is equal to 3.28 feet which was the unit that people used before the meter was introduced.  

Today, everywhere you go in the world people know exactly how long a meter is so when they measure the distance between two places, everyone knows exactly how far it is. This was not always the case! As you might have guessed, the “foot”, which is the unit of length most commonly used in the United States, was originally based on the length of a human foot. Before people had standardized rulers with standardized feet, they would measure distance by literally pacing it off with their own feet. This created lots of problems because people have different sized feet. A person with small feet would come up with a longer distance than a person with large feet. Without having standards in measurement, you cannot make fair comparisons that everyone can agree on! 

EARTH IS BIG by Steve Tomecek, illustrated by Marquitos Farina out now in hardback (£14.99, What on Earth Books). For ages 7+.

***

A massive thanks to Steve for the blog post! It’s a pleasure to host such a range of authors on my blog!

Remember to check out the rest of the blog tour where you’ll see all sorts (details below)

S x