Grading papers this afternoon, I ran (again) into a very typical student phrase. My author was writing about the amount of Christians and Jews in the world.
I'll leave aside the interesting question why this oddity persists, but students are convinced that we measure people (not dogs or cars or pizzas) by volume and refer to "a great amount of people" at the meeting. I got curious. Let's assume I have a class of 20 students and an average weight of 150 pounds. The dean asks, "How was attendance today?" I could answer, "Very good. A ton and a half of students showed up." Or at an average of 2.8 cubic feet per student, the answer might be "56 cubic feet of student, which works out to nearly 419 gallons." (That's 349 Imperial gallons, but nobody uses those any more. If my students were all Canadians, the answer would be something like "1586 liters of student—1360 kilograms.")
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