The other lunacy is “...times it by 5.” What the heck? Why can’t they just say “...multiply it by 5”?
Don’t get me started on “verse” as in “It’s the New York Yankees verse the Boston Red Sox.”
Aaaaggghhhh.
Re: Apophis will come only one-tenth of the average distance between the Earth and the sun, more than 40 times as distant as the moon is from Earth.
They don’t want to come right out and tell you the actual distance in miles because it’s still going to be ridiculously far away even during the 2029 “close approach”, in this case about 9 MILLION miles. How many readers have any idea how far the sun is from earth, or even how far the moon is.
Sun, on average, is approximately 92.5 million miles away, the moon, about 240,000.