be two times narrower than / be two times as narrow as

[ShadeWe]

I came across this sentence in a book:

The narrow beam of the laser is a thousand millions times narrower than sunlight.

Will it be wrong if I say: The narrow beam of the laser is a thousand millions times as narrow as sunlight.

What's the difference between them?


And one more question not related to the topic of this thread (to avoid the creation of lots of threads):
Do they mean the same?

- present a problem
- represent a problem

 

[Rover_KE]

I came across this sentence in a book

What book? Who wrote it? Always give us this information, please.

The sentence is ungrammatical and meaningless to me.

Please ask the unrelated question in a separate thread.

 

[ShadeWe]

Actually, I don't know. I only know that the authors of this book are Russian (it doesn't matter, they are not native speakers), and I often see some strange things like this in this book.

About my question: I was said that the construction of the first example (taken from the book) may be understood incorrectly by some people and that I need to avoid this way of saying that something is larger than something else , but nobody talked to me that it's incorrect. Is it right to think that It's twice larger - incorrect, and it's twice as larger - correct?

 

[GoesStation]

Although it's possible to say that one thing is a thousand million times smaller than something else (a billion in American English), we usually avoid that construction. Write A laser beam is one billionth (or "one thousand-millionth" in old-fashioned British English) as wide.

 

[SoothingDave]

I don't think of sunlight as "narrow," so I'm not sure what the comparison is supposed to mean.

 

[andrewg927]

I don't think of sunlight as "narrow," so I'm not sure what the comparison is supposed to mean.

Light including sunlight or laser is a wave so the comparison makes sense to me.