To add more about the quant, as I'm usually quite descriptive, a quant, in it's shortest form, is one unscaled texture pixel. A quant can be any unit of measurement you want. The measurement comparision depends on the type of game/project you're working on. If you're doing a shooter game, 1 quant = 1 inch would be a decent scaling. If you're doing an ant simulator where you try to build ant colonies, 1 quant might be 1 millimeter or so. If you're doing a project that involves travel between the planets, then one quant might equal 10 miles or even 100 miles. It all depends on what kind of project you're working on.
While building your levels, decide on a scaling and stick with it. If you started off with 1 quant being 1 inch then changed it to 1 quant being 1 centimeter, and built a model based on this, your model will end up being 2 1/2 times bigger than expected. Set a scale and stick with it (unless you want your game to take place in giant land or mini land where everything is gigantic or miniature compared to you). If you want something at an exact height, you can take out Windows calculator and type in some numbers to figure it out. If you use, for example, the 32 quants = 5 feet scaling, and if you wanted a human model being 5 feet 10.5 inches tall (70.5 inches), you'd need to make your model 37.6 quants tall. If you wanted an odd-shaped roof for a house measuring 256 by 1024 quants and 48 quants high, using the same scale, your roof would be 40 by 160 feet and 7.5 feet high.
In WED, at the closest zoom possible, each of the smaller squares represents 16 quants (provided you've left it at the default). The larger squares represent 128 quants. If you were to zoom out more, the original large squares become the small squares and another larger set of 1024 quants is divided. If you zoom out to the maximum, the large squares from the middle setting become the small squares (1024 quants) and the larger squares will then represent 8192 quants. A medium-sized level would be about 12000 by 12000 quants (from the top view; if your scaling was 16 quants = 1 foot, then your map would span 750 feet). You can make your levels as big or as small as you want. Blocks can only go out to 125,000 quants from the origin, but models, map entities, sprites, terrains, etc., can go out much further than that, up to 999,999.999 quants from the origin as far as I've heard.
While working with games, knowledge of mathematics (basic arithmatic mainly, but algebra, geometry, triginometry, and other fields of math are recommended) is helpful. Calculators come in handy for helping you out with the complicated stuff. When working with quants and real-life scaling, mathematics for conversions is key to proper scaling of your world.