The way to educate people is to say "less than 1/3 the distance to the sun (that is, less than 1/3 of an astronomical unit or AU)". It would have been easy to

The way to educate people is to say "less than 1/3 the distance to the sun (that is, less than 1/3 of an astronomical unit or AU)". It would have been easy to structure the sentence in a way to make it clear that this is not a coincidence. This is exactly the missed opportunity that I was trying to point out. If you write "less than 1/3 X" and then later "or about 1/3 Y", surely you can agree that's not the very best way to point out that X and Y are definitionally equivalent, right?