Quibans 61: Easter Eggs

From the Daily Mail:

How much exercise will it take to burn off your Easter egg?

Even if you're dedicated to your fitness regime and healthy eating, you might be tempted to allow some leeway for an Easter treat. But before you crack open that chocolate egg, it might be worth noting just how much exercise you'd have to do to burn off all those extra calories.

There follows a table of values, provided below.  I have added to it the weight of the Easter Eggs (taken from elsewhere in the article).

If you can't see all of the data then you could use the image that follows, or copy and paste into Word or Excel (this works best from IE rather than Chrome).

EGG	CALORIES	WALKING	RUNNING	SWIMMING	SIT-UPS	SQUATS	BURPEES	Weight (in g)
DairyMilkXL	1,758	5.9hours	3hours	2hours	5.2hours	2.1hours	3.7hours	331
CadburyCaramel	1,683	5.6hours	2.9hours	1.9hours	4.9hours	2hours	3.5hours	331
Mars	1,623	5.4hours	2.8hours	1.8hours	4.8hours	1.9hours	3.4hours	331
Flake/Wispa	1,562	5.2hours	2.7hours	1.8hours	4.6hours	1.9hours	3.3hours	295
DoubleDecker	1,549	5.2hours	2.7hours	1.7hours	4.5hours	1.9hours	3.2hours
Oreo	1,528	5.1hours	2.6hours	1.7hours	4.5hours	1.8hours	3.2hours	278
Snickers	1,429	4.8hours	2.5hours	1.6hours	4.2hours	1.7hours	3hours	274
M&M's	1,385	4.6hours	2.4hours	1.6hours	4.1hours	1.6hours	2.9hours	268
Minstrels	1,357	4.5hours	2.3hours	1.5hours	4hours	1.6hours	2.8hours	262
Aero	1,259	4.2hours	2.2hours	1.4hours	3.7hours	1.5hours	2.6hours	235
Yorkie	1,033	3.5hours	1.8hours	1.1hours	3hours	1.2hours	2.2hours	192
ToffeeCrisp	1,004	3.4hours	1.7hours	1.1hours	3hours	1.2hours	2.1hours	176
MiniEggs	980	3.3hours	1.7hours	1.1hours	2.9hours	1.2hours	2hours	187
CremeEgg	922	3.1hours	1.6hours	1hour	2.7hours	1.1hours	1.9hours	186
KitKat	943	3.1hours	1.6hours	1.1hours	2.8hours	1.1hours	2hours	180
Milkybar	886	3hours	1.5hours	1hour	2.6hours	1.1hours	1.9hours	162
Matchmaker	872	2.9hours	1.5hours	1hour	2.5hours	1.1hours	1.8hours	162
Thorntons	806	2.7hours	1.4hours	54mins	2.4hours	1hour	1.7hours	149
Smarties	680	2.3hours	1.2hours	46mins	2hours	49mins	1.4hours	122

Things to do:

What is the conversion rate between the different types of exercise?

What type of correlation would you expect between the weight of the egg and the number of calories?  Work out the pmcc.  Comment on your answer.

Answer: 

The pmcc between the weight of the egg and the number of calories is 0.993

The correlation is extremely good.  Unsurprisingly, this tells us that heavier eggs (which presumably contain more chocolate) contain more calories!

Source: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4402510/How-exercise-burn-Easter-egg.html

Quibans 60: Two short Quibans - United Airlines / Carers

Here are two brief pieces of information from BBC articles that could be used to create short questions, or which could be explored in greater detail.

United Airlines incident: Why do airlines overbook?

Overbooking on flights happens all the time. Empty seats cost airlines money, so they offset the number of passengers who miss flights by selling too many tickets.Of the 613 million people who flew on major US carriers in 2015, 46,000 were involuntarily denied boarding, according to data from the Department of Transportation.

Question: Is that a lot of people?

Answer: It depends how you look at it.

In percentage terms, it is 0.008%

613 million people is about 10 times the population of the UK, whereas 46,000 is the population of a town.

613 million people is about a tenth of the population of the world.  46,000 is the population of 23 large secondary schools

Social care system 'beginning to collapse' as 900 carers quit every day

More than 900 adult social care workers a day quit their job in England last year, new figures reveal.  60% of those leaving a job left working in the adult social care sector altogether.  The average full-time frontline care worker earned £7.69 an hour, or £14,800 a year.

Question 1:  What percentage of the total workforce leaves that sector each year?

Question 2:  How much do you have to work to earn the stated figure?

               

Answer 1:  We need to estimate how many workers there are in total.  I predict that of the 65 million people in the country about one in 20 need some form of care.  Maybe each carer can look after 3 people?  That gives about 1 million carers. 

About 900 per day is 900 x 365 per year, which is approx. 300,000 who leave their job, and 180,000 (60% of them) leave the sector.  180,000 out of 1 million leave each year, so about 18% (approx 1/6) leave each year.

The article states:  Data gathered by the charity Skills for Care, shows that in 2015-16 there were more than 1.3 million people employed in the adult social care sector in England.

Answer 2: This is for 1925 hours of work.  I don’t know whether the newspaper has taken the hourly figure and multiplied by 38-hour weeks over 50 weeks in the year, or whether this is genuinely what most carers do.

Sources: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39556910

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39507859

Quibans 59: Greenpeace vs Coke

From an email sent by Greenpeace:

What questions?

Here are some ideas:

1) How many bottles per year in the UK?

2) What percentage of the global bottles are sold in the UK?

3) How much landfill would the bottles (in the UK) take up per day?

4) In Germany they charge a deposit of ¢25 (you pay an extra 25 cents when you buy a plastic bottle of drink, but if you return the empty bottle (via a Reverse Vending Machine) they give you the 25 cents back).  At the current exchange rate, what would the total deposit be on the UK bottles?  What percentage do you estimate would not be returned?

5) In 2015, 93.5% of plastic bottles were recycled in Germany.  If we managed to get a similar percentage in this country, how many bottles per day would be recycled?

Answers:

1) Using upper and lower bounds on the 16 million per day (and then multiplying by 365) I get somewhere between 5.7 billion and 6.0 billion bottles per year.

2) This means about 6% of the global bottles (and presumably the global drink sales) are in the UK.

3) If we assume the bottles are crushed to half their size and that the majority will be 500ml bottles then we could say that each bottle will take up about ¼ litre.  Multiply this by 16 million to get 4 million litres, which is 4,000 cubic metres.  Lots!

4) The students will need to look up the current exchange rate.

5) If the 16 million figure is assumed to be exact then 93.5% of that is 14.96 million.

Sources:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/sites/files/gpuk/the-case-against-coca-cola.pdf

https://waste-management-world.com/a/bottle-deposits-responsible-for-high-pet-recycling-rate-in-germany

Quibans 58: Term-time holidays

This news story was widely reported. This one is taken from the Daily Mail because their graphic is useful:

Now end the school holiday rip-offs: Parents hit out at having to pay more for breaks after the Supreme Court rules children CAN'T miss lessons

Travel companies must stop ripping off families for breaks during school holidays following a landmark Supreme Court ruling, critics demanded last night.

Parents, heads and politicians called on ministers to ‘cap’ the price of summer getaways, which can rise by more than £1,000 at the end of term.

Firms were accused of ‘holding law-abiding parents to ransom’ after a father yesterday lost his fight against a £60 fine for an unauthorised term-time trip.

The ruling means families will face a fine or prosecution if pupils take even half a day off without permission. Parents now have little choice but to book within school holidays, leaving them at the mercy of travel firms charging sky-high prices. Lib Dem education spokesman John Pugh said ‘greedy’ firms must ‘stop exploiting hardworking parents’.

‘Travel companies are holding law-abiding parents to ransom,’ he said. ‘They should be forced to cap the cost of trips in school holidays so they are not so completely out of step with holidays a week earlier or a week later. Travel companies should not be allowed to profiteer off the back of hardworking parents.’

Nearly 150,000 families were issued penalties for taking children out of school without permission during term time in the last school year – raking in a total of almost £9million for 145 councils in England, according to The Independent.

Questions: 

Clearly, we can fill in the gaps in the image.  Are there any other questions we can ask/answer?

• If you treat the £60 as an additional cost for the price of your June holiday (which becomes £120 because the figures assume a family of two adults, two children), how much does it increase the cost of each holiday?
• What is slightly odd about the figures about the number of fines?

Answers:

The full image is below.  Note that the while the percentages can be calculated in a way that agrees with the newspaper’s figures, the other values can’t (because of rounding issues).  The upper/lower bounds could be calculated if you wish …

The £120 of fines increases the cost of each of the holidays by: 

8%

15%

3%

4%

2%

£9 million divided by 150,000 families is £60 each.  This would mean each family was fined for taking exactly one child out of school.  It seems a little surprising that none of the families had more than one child.  Presumably this has just been clumsily phrased in the article and should read “Nearly 150,000 penalties were issued for taking children out of school…”.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4388318/Now-end-school-holiday-rip-offs-Supreme-Court-ruling.html

Quibans 57: Tolkien Reading Day

Edited version of a Cambridge News article, using only the first one of the ‘five things’:

Five things to do to celebrate Tolkien Reading Day

Have you ever muttered the words 'my precious' in a sinister tone? Mistaken an elderly gentleman with a giant white beard as Gandalf? Or bellowed 'you shall not pass!' to someone standing in your way?

The chances are that you've heard or done one of these things. And they all have one thing in common - apart from being somewhat anti-social, they are all references to author J.R.R Tolkien's universe.

Today (March 25) is Tolkien Reading Day, and what better way to commemorate the day than with a five things to do list:

1. Read all the Lord of the Rings books

Let's be honest - the books that distinguish Tolkien over the rest is his Lord of the Rings series. There's no better way to celebrate his work than to read his most recognised pieces.

Let's say the average person in Cambridge reads at least 300 words per minute.

According to a few sources, it takes approximately six hours and seven minutes to read the Fellowship of the Ring, four hours and 59 minutes to read The Two Towers, and six hours and seven minutes to read the Return of the King.

An estimation of around 17 hours proves it's possible. If you start now.

Questions:

1) How many words are there in each book?

2) How many pages is each book?

3) Is it reasonable to read 300 words per minute?

Answers:

1) 6 hours and 7 minutes = 6x60 + 7 = 367 minutes.  367 x 300 = 110,100 words.

4 hours and 59 minutes = 5x60 - 1 = 299 minutes.  299 x 300 = 89,700 words.

The third book is the same as the first one.  Surely it can’t be sensible to be so ‘accurate’ with the timings?  They are crying out to be rounded off…

2) A paperback book has about 250 words per page, so divide these numbers by 250 to get 440 and 360.

3) There are lots of ways to work this out.  One is for everyone to time themselves reading some text and then to work out their words-per-minute.

Any text can be used, but the first 184 words of The Fellowship of the Ring seem appropriate! 

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure. And if that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigour to marvel at. Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved ; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.

Additional thoughts:

Go to http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/wordscount and hover over the titles of the books.  Here they have the actual, accurate word counts.  They are: 187790, 156198 and 137115.  

Now calculate the actual length of time it would take to read them, using the reading speeds calculated earlier!

Sources: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/five-things-celebrate-tolkien-reading-12795423

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/books/chapters/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring.html

http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/wordscount

Quibans 56: All you can eat

Thanks to Jamie for pointing me to this article, from the Daily Mail online:

How to BEAT the all-you-can-eat buffet: The expensive foods you should fill up on (and the cheap ones to avoid to get your money’s worth) 
The hacks were revealed on Channel 4's new documentary The 2,000,000 Calorie Buffet.The show, which airs on Monday, reveals that Brits spend around £4,000 on dining out a year.One of the most popular options for eating out is the all-you-can-eat buffet as you pay one low price - usually between £12 and £15 - and can eat as much as you like.But there's money to be made in this business - on a typical night, one of these restaurants can make £12,000. The show looks at the best ways to beat the buffet, as well as the tactics the restaurants employ to earn as much profit as they can.

Questions:

1) Is it reasonable that “Brits spend around £4,000 on dining out a year”?

2) How much do we spend on food in a year?

3) Where does “2,000,000 Calories” come from?

Answers:

1) This seems massively high.  It is about £10 per day (exactly £10 per day would be £3650 per year, which could sensibly have been rounded.  Taking the £12 cost of a buffet meal, that makes £4380, which also rounds to £4000, so you could have a buffet meal every day of the year.  Alternatively it is about £80 per week, which seems like an expensive meal to me. 

2) This is a nice opportunity to think about supermarket shopping (take the family bill for the week, subtract non-food items and then divide by the number of members of the family, add on other purchases (coffee, soft drinks, snacks, etc).

3) If a restaurant makes £12,000 per night and it costs about £12 then that requires 1000 customers.  If the average calorie intake per day is 2000 then multiplying the two gives 2 million calories.  (I have no idea whether that is where this comes from, but it seems plausible!)

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-4253622/How-BEAT-eat-buffet.html

Quibans 55: Super Bowl in Space

From the BBC website:

Super Bowl: Astronaut throws football '564,644 yards'

Nasa has released a video of the International Space Station crew preparing to watch the Super Bowl from 250 miles above Earth.

Show the first 3 seconds (and then stop it!) of the video.  The BBC article is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38866754

The video is also available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxIVWIPYhco

So: how fast is the International Space Station moving?

Given that the circumference of the earth is about 25,000 miles, how long does it take the space station to orbit the earth?

Answers:

It travels 564,644 yards in about 64 seconds.  (Use the fact that the ball is released about 5 seconds into the video and the video says it lasts 1 minute 9 seconds.

Divide the number of yards by 64 to get 8822.563 yards per sec

There are 1760 yards in a mile.  So this is 5.01282 miles per sec

Multiply by 3600 to get 18046.15 mph

Given the estimates involved, round this off to 18,000mph.

The circumference of the earth is 25,000 miles, which gives a radius of 25,000 / (2*pi) = 3979

Add 250 (height of orbit of ISS) and then multiply by 2*pi() to get the circumference of the orbit = 26600.  Divide this by the speed to get 1.5 hours for one orbit.

(According to Wikipedia, one orbit lasts 92 minutes.)