Is -7 a lower number than -5?

I found this article recently. It's a bit of a shocker. A company which makes scratch-cards had an idea - if the scratcher reveals a lower number than the number on the front panel, the punter wins. The cards were withdrawn because too many people displayed a complete lack of knowledge of maths and dealt with the "-" sign in front of a number as entirely optional; considering it didn't add anything to the meaning.

Some woman in Manchester was even happy to go on the record, under her own name, after confirming she had no GCSE in Maths, and say: "the card doesn't say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number".

I propose people who don't get negative numbers are sent to Siberia to test their theory that -40 is in fact warmer than -2; it being a higher number and all.

But at that point I suspect the C/F discussion would come up, swiftly followed by the soft "pfffft" as the hamster in the head stops pedalling.