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1 Man, 12 Dogs, 12,000 kilometres
The article in today’s Globe and Mail with the above headline mentioned that some guy was dogsledding to commemorate Manitoba’s 140th birthday but what I couldn’t understand was why he was going all the way to Peru? Wouldn’t going through the Central American rain forests be a little tough on the huskies? Of course, a quick glance down to paragraph two indicated that the distance should have been 1,200 kilometres. But nobody caught the error because when it comes to facts and arithmetic, we’re losing our ability to apply simple “smell” tests.
If you know that Canada is approximately 5,000 kilometres coast-to-coast 12,000 sounds like an awfully (unbelievably?) long way. But how do you apply “higher order thinking skills” to a report like the one above if you don’t have the basic facts (in your head) with which to start your analysis? Sure you can look them up in Wikipedia, but try that in a meeting at work when you’re discussing relative maritime shipping distances from Mumbai and Shanghai to Vancouver without looking stupid!