0

From my experience, when we give a range we usually go from lowest to highest.

EG, from 1 to 10

I was reading about mosquitoes and saw this

The average mosquito bite drains 0.01 to 0.001 milliliters of blood.

Sorry if this is off topic, maybe English stack exchange site is better for this but... Is this normal? Are decimals (as a range) usually referred to highest to lowest?

My own googling shows nothing around this

MyDaftQuestions
  • 113
  • 3
    I would say it is (much) more typical to define a range by starting with the lower number. – lulu Jul 21 '19 at 20:33
  • Can I ask why it is spam? I have no links, I've been a member for years.. @szw1710 and the other site I refer to is part of the stack exchange – MyDaftQuestions Jul 21 '19 at 20:39
  • This is my personal opinion I used the voting form and I don't know why it appereed here. I agree, such opinion should not be seen here. – szw1710 Jul 21 '19 at 20:53
  • This is definitely not spam; if somebody flagged this as spam, then they did so by mistake. – Tanner Swett Jul 21 '19 at 20:56
  • The quoted text about mosqitos is simply the typo. There is no a deep reason to consider it here. But... I repeat, this is my personal opinion, – szw1710 Jul 21 '19 at 21:01

1 Answers1

4

What was written is possibly unintentional. Though I don't think I would call it wrong, it's far more common to start a range with a lower number, regardless of whether the numbers are greater than $1$. But there are some occasions when lower implies "more," like with negative temperatures, which might be listed as a range in the opposite order. In this case though I would've written $0.001$ to $0.01$.

Matt Samuel
  • 58,164