Really? If a high school student couldn't, they'd fail basic mathematics. Of course you'd have to look up the current exchange rate, but that goes for all currency conversion. Having to look up an exchange rate is part of the process of currency conversion.
I think GP meant off the top of your head knowing the current-day conversion rate, which would be impressive; not simply doing the calculation which is certainly trivial, by what grade level, 3rd?
Quite a lot of non-USians have rough USD conversion rates in their head for understanding US articles. £1 =~ $1.6 (or $1.5 if you want to do the arithmetic in your head) =~ EUR 1.2 . That's stable enough.
Well, yes, but given they change, if you are doing currency conversion you have to look it up anyway. Always knowing the currency rate for all currencies without looking it up would be impressive, if only because nobody can do that.
Just wanted to point out -- since I actually wrote that original article -- is that I wrote it for a general audience. We have existing relationships with a lot of media partners like BI so sometimes I write for their audience in mind to cull traffic back to the site, which has a way more niche audience (but I still like to make it as accessible as possible to the general public). Depending on where I'm trying to garner press from, I'll write with different audiences in mind. (...if anyone's interested in the business/media/pr aspect of it all.)
Apologies if I insulted anyone's intelligence but that wasn't the point. COP, by far, is not a standard or major currency. How do you think my mother is going to react when I talk to her about Guatemalan quetzales? She, does, however understand Euros but for the purposes of this example, which is a Colombian flight, it made no sense to use a different currency.
I was probably being an over-judgemental arsehole, is just that it seemed really weird to have a price in a foreign currency referred to in a piece as "a lot of mumbo jumbo to most people", especially in a business paper, though I would have found it out of place in the normal press as well.
I do not have any idea how your mother would react, however I am sure that prices in Guatemalan quetzales can be presented in an article for general readership outside Guatemala without worrying too much about how the audience might react and without describing the written price as mumbo-jumbo, or otherwise confusing.
You just tell them that the prices are in Guatemalan quetzales and how much it is in something more well known. There is absolutely no need to prepare people for the shock of the existence of obscure currencies.
The US journalist H. L. Mencken was quoted as saying:
"No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
For my money, writers taking this advice to heart has been one of the most damaging forces in journalism and the knock-on negative effects into the culture are incalculable in their horrendous variety.
