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.)

Quibans 54: Terrorism vs gun violence

While this is a news story from a few months ago, it seems rather relevant right now.  From CNN:

American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence in one graph

October 3, 2016

Using numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that from 2001 to 2014, 440,095 people died by firearms on US soil. (2014 is the most recent year for which the CDC has data for deaths by firearms.) This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide.

According to the US State Department, the number of US citizens killed overseas as a result of incidents of terrorism from 2001 to 2014 was 369.

In addition, we compiled all terrorism incidents inside the United States and found that between 2001 and 2014, there were 3,043 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism. This brings the total to 3,412.

Possible questions:

1) How many years have been included?

2) Why is this starting point relevant?

3) What percentage of the deaths by terrorism took place in 2001?

4) What percentage of the deaths by firearms occurred in 2014?

5a) Of all of the deaths in 2014, what percentage of them involved terrorism?

5b) Rewrite part (a) in the form “1 in ###”

6) What percentage of the terrorism incidents took place on US soil?

7) What other questions can you ask/answer?

Answers:

1) How many years have been included?  14 years (not 2014 – 2001 = 13).

2) Why is this starting point relevant?  The September 11^th attacks took place in 2001.

3) What percentage of the deaths by terrorism took place in 2001?  87.6%

4) What percentage of the deaths by firearms occurred in 2014?  7.6%

5a) Of all of the deaths in 2014, what percentage of them involved terrorism?  0.095%

5b) 1 in 1050

6) What percentage of the terrorism incidents took place on US soil?  89%

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/03/us/terrorism-gun-violence/

Quibans 53: Trump's Wall

From the Guardian:

Mission: fill in the gaps.

We discussed the equivocating language that has been used here ('likely', 'assuming', 'could cost', etc).  We also talked about other Walls (in the West Bank, Cyprus, Korean peninsula, Berlin).

Are the figures in the image reasonable ones?  Will it really be that high?  Can a wall that high really be only a foot thick?

Our calculations gave us about 8.9 million cubic metres of concrete and a total estimated cost of $38 billion.  Reasonably, my class wanted to round this off to $40 billion.  The original Guardian article is linked below.  Here is the image:

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/25/mexico-enrique-pena-nieto-trump-border-wall 

Quibans 52: Big Mexican Food

Two articles, the first taken from the Daily Telegraph, the second from the international news organisation Reuters:

Families line up for slice of 4,724-metre long cake to celebrate Three Kings Feast

Several thousand people gathered in Mexico City's huge Zocalo plaza on Thursday evening to partake in a gigantic Three Kings Day cake known as a "rosca."
The monumental rosca weighed in at 9,371 kilos (20,660 lbs) and measured 4,724 metres long (15,500 ft) before it was cut up into giant pieces and given to anyone wanting a piece.

Mexico makes mammoth 'torta sandwich'

An army of chefs in Mexico City on Wednesday (July 27) crafted a 66-metre (###-foot) monster "torta" sandwich - making it the biggest sandwich of its kind ever made in Latin America.
Local authorities and dozens of local business rolled up their sleeves to prepare the mega sandwich in less than 4 minutes - known as "torta" in Mexico.
Despite its super size, the sandwich didn't quite make it into the big league.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest sandwich ever made was in 2005 in the United States and weighed ### kg (11,993 lb), while the honor of the longest sandwich goes to Lebanon with a sandwich over 7.5 meters (2,411 feet) long in 2011.


What questions can be asked/answered?
Here are a few ideas:
1) What is the conversion between kg and lbs in the first article?
2) What is the conversion between metres and feet in the first article?
3) What is the weight of cake per metre?

4) How many pieces of cake might there be?

5) In the second article, how long (in feet) was the torta?

6) What was the weight in kg of the biggest sandwich ever made?

7) What is the error in the final sentence?

8) How did the longest sandwich compare with the cake?

9) If you could keep it fresh, for how long would the cake/sandwich feed one person?

Answers:

1) 1kg = 2.205 lb

2) 1m = 3.28 ft

3) 1.98kg per metre

4) The cake can’t be more than about ½ metre wide (otherwise it wouldn’t fit in an oven), so we might assume an area of 4724 x ½ = 2362 square metres.  If each piece has an area of 10cm by 10cm then there will be 100 pieces in a square metre.  This would give 236200 pieces; about a quarter of a million!

5) Using the conversion from the first article we get 216.55m.  The second article gives 216-foot.

6) Using the conversion from the first article we get 5440kg, which is what the second article gives.

7) In the final sentence the unusual spellings (‘honor’ and ‘meter’) are because this is using American English.  The error is the conversion: 7.5 meters (2,411 feet).   2411 feet is actually 735 metres.

8) Using the measurements given in feet, the longest sandwich is 15.6% of the length of the cake.

9) In Subway they sell ‘foot-long’ sandwiches.  One of those per day would mean the sandwich would last 2411 days, which is 6 years and 31 weeks.

The cake would last for 80 years if you had 8 pieces per day.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/impoverished-mexican-families-line-4724-metre-long-cake-three/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-sandwich-record-idUSKCN10915O

Quibans 51: Monster Carrots

From the Cambridge News:

Frenzied Friday: Supermarkets to see surge in last minute food shoppers before Christmas

Supermarkets across the country are bracing themselves for rush of last minute Christmas food shoppers today (December 23).

Already dubbed 'Frenzied Friday', many stores are expected to have their busiest day of the year as millions of customers stock up for some Christmas feasting.

Tesco's has predicted that over 10 million customers will be visiting its stores throughout the day, around 15,000 per minute.

Tesco expects to selling 40 million Brussels sprouts across today and yesterday as well as 3.5 million carrots - enough to stretch around the world 11 times.

The big thing here is having an idea about the size of numbers. An initial question (before showing the other questions):

Question zero) Do the numbers in the question seem reasonable ones?


Questions:

Q1) “10 million customers […], around 15,000 per minute”. What does this tell us?

Q2) The distance from the north pole to the equator is 10,000 km. How big would a carrot need to be if the news story is accurate?


Answers:

Q0) The number of customers seems reasonable, but the number of carrots seems to be much too small to stretch around the world 11 times.

Q1) 10 million divided by 15,000 equals just over 11 hours. So either Tesco stores are open for 11 hours a day, or they have sensibly decided that more people shop during the day rather than in the middle of the night.

Q2) The circumference of the earth is 40 million metres. 11 times round the world would be 440 million metres. Dividing that by 3.5 million carrots gives an average carrot-length of 126 metres. Monster carrots! 12.6cm seems more reasonable for the length of a carrot so dividing by 1000 would be useful.

There are three easy ways to do this: make an error and assume the circumference of the world is actually 40,000 metres (rather than km); sell 3.5 billion carrots, or say that the carrots will go 0.011 times round the world!

If you decide that the Brussels sprouts should be included (the sentence is potentially ambiguous, even if you ignore the grammatical typo) then that doesn’t help (unless you have Monster Sprouts…).

Source: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/frenzied-friday-supermarkets-see-surge-12364134