This Quibans is taken from several sources, including BBC
News and the Washington Post.
It is likely many students will have heard about this tweet
by Donald Trump’s son:
If you want some of the political reaction to this then you
can follow the links below (under ‘sources’).
The BBC article included this:
Here are some figures:
- Each year, the risk to an American of being killed by a refugee in a terror attack is 1 in 3.64 billion.
- The manufacturers of Skittles make 200 million of them each day.
- An ordinary size packet of Skittles contains 54 sweets and 231 Calories (12% of the RDA).
- An Olympic swimming pool doesn't have a shallow end (!). It has length 50m, width 25m and depth 3m.
What can we work out?
Q1) How much more likely are you to die from choking on food
than in a refugee-instigated terror attack?
Q2) If we want to
follow up on the analogy, when there are three poisoned Skittles, how many
Skittles are there altogether?
Q3) What is the total
volume of these Skittles?
Q4) Wikipedia: "An Olympic-size swimming pool is used
as a colloquial unit of volume, to make approximate comparisons to similarly
sized objects or volumes." How many
swimming pools do we need to hold the Skittles?
Q5) How many days
will it take to make this many Skittles?
Q6) How many packets
is this? How many days of calories?
Much of this (and some more probability work too) is covered
in the excellent Washington Post article by Philip Bump (link below). It might be good to ask students to read that
article after using this Quibans.
Sources:
