The Scale of the Solar System

Confusing, inconsistent and careless are words to describe the way in which the concepts of scale and comparison are explained in this series entitled “The Scale of Things”. Each title begins with an introduction which invites readers to look at the various entries in the book and compare them to a specific item- for example, the height of an average door can be used to imagine the heights of specific animals. But after the introduction, these examples are never mentioned again. Rather, it is left up to young readers to remember the instruction and to figure it out for themselves. It makes perfect sense to use objects with which children are familiar to compare to other things, but this is done only occasionally. Each entry is described by height, length, weight, distance or diameter, depending on the topic, and then compared to the entry on the following page. For instance, on one page one would read about the Statue of Liberty and the London Eye and, on the following page, the comparison would be between the London Eye and the Golden Gate Bridge, and so on. Interesting facts are interspersed throughout the text.

Since scale and large numbers can be difficult for young children to understand, the information in the series should have been simplified with comparisons made to relatable objects in the kids’ world. Can children really understand that an ostrich is 75,000 times heavier than a male bee hummingbird or that the Golden Gate Bridge is equivalent in height to one London Eye and one Statue of Liberty stacked on top of each other? Also confusing is mixing height and length: the height of a giraffe is described as being equivalent to the length of one rhino plus one panda. Even worse is the description of the length of an elephant as being equivalent to the length of a panda plus the height of a giraffe.

Careless editing also comes into play: in the glossary of The Scale of Buildings and Structures, gladiators are described as “men trained to fight at shows in ancient Roman”; in The Scale of Landforms, a tree, the Hyperion, is one of the entries (a tree is NOT a landform); in the title about famous journeys, the author states “Ben Lecomte is believed to have swam across the Atlantic Ocean”; and the graphics of weights are clearly not drawn to scale (this alone is a glaring error in a series about scale). Two examples: in the title about dinosaurs, there are drawings of two weights, one 15 kg and the other 7,257 kg, but the smaller one is about 25-30% of the size of the larger one; in the animal book, a balance scale shows a blue whale on one side of the scale and a single car on the other, yet the text states that the weight of a blue whale is equivalent to 152 small cars. Perhaps, if something is difficult to show in an illustration, then the illustration should not be included.

Illustrations consist of coloured drawings, maps and infographics, including some bar and pictographs. A table of contents, a glossary and an index are also provided.

The Scale of the Solar System features the planets in relation to their diameters and their distance from the sun. In this title, the graphics can be somewhat misleading because they show planets stacked up on top of one another, yet they are comparing diameter. Though all of the books in the series could use some adult assistance in helping children to understand the concepts, it is probably most imperative in this title. It would be useful to show children how to measure diameter with string and various sizes of Styrofoam or other types of balls, perhaps borrowed from the school gymnasium, in order to show, for instance, that the diameter of Venus is equal to the combined diameters of Mars and Mercury.

Much revision would have to be done in order to make this series – and the concepts within the books – more useful and relatable for children.