95 – 21 = ?

Posted by jns on 3 March 2010

This is a fine development in UK news for people LGBTness, but my interest in this excerpt is in the second sentence/paragraph:

The House of Lords voted to lift the ban on civil partnership ceremonies in churches and other religious premises last night.

Peers voted by 95 to 21 – a majority of 74 – to lift the ban which previously prevented gays and lesbians from getting “married” in such places.

[from Mary Bowers, "Peers vote for church civil partnership ceremonies", TimesOnline [UK], 3 March 2010.]

Is it just me or is it odd to have the newspaper doing subtraction for us?

Maybe it’s my internal physicist, maybe it’s because I like numbers, or maybe it’s just my personality as a secret stair-counter, but whenever I read or hear an assertion with numbers, some sort of calculation usually happens in my head. I don’t think I’m alone on this.

“Hmm,” I think, “95 to 21, that’s a majority of 74 out of 116 peers, close to a 75% majority.” This usually gets one more refinement — 74% if it were a 100, but it’s 16% more than 100 so subtract about 15% of 74 from 74 gives about 63 — so let’s say about 63%. Not a bad majority.

Did I learn somewhere along the way always to calculate percentages or fractions when I’m given two numbers as input?

Okay, so I realize that quite a few people feel uncomfortable around fractions and percentages, although I’d like them not to. But isn’t addition and subtraction pretty much within the comfort level of most readers of that newspaper article?

So that leaves me trying to understand why the author (or, perhaps, editors), felt it necessary to subtract 21 from 95 in print.