An example of a quantitative comparison with an everyday example used in popular science writing:
"When an X chromosome is inactivated, it adopts a very unusual physical conformation. The DNA becomes incredibly compacted. Imagine you and a friend each take hold of opposite ends of a towel. You start turning your end of the towel clockwise, and you friend does the same at the other end. Pretty quickly, the towel will start twisting in the middle, and the two of you will be pulled closer together. Now imagine that the towel is about five metres in length, but you manage to keep twisting it until it's a dense slump of towel only a millimetre in linear length. By this stage, the towel is extraordinarily tightly would up. Essentially, the X chromosome becomes as tightly compacted as that towel.
Nessa Carey (2015) Junk DNA. A journey through the dark matter of the genome. London: Icon Books Ltd.
Read about quotidian comparisons
