By treating people like idiots they turn them into idiots. It’s like “The lenght of 5 football fields” or “The weight of 10 elephants” are they writing for 3rd graders?
technically football fields do have a well-defined length at least. often this sort of thing is lampooned as 'americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system' but i've seen it in overseas journalism as well. i don't see anything of this in the article in question, though, except for 'atom-sized holes', which seems entirely appropriate
