Things I Learned While Reading This Summer (1996)
(and will use to develop problems for my class)
by Dick Sietz

  • 99% of the universe is Nothing!
  • There are 97 million households in the USA -- 55% are couples.
  • The United States has 42,496 ZIP codes.
  • There-are 190 towns or villages called Midway in the United States.
  • One in every 14 laptop computers sold in the United States was stolen.
  • One in 22,000 people in the US are amputees. One in 200 in Cambodia.
  • The archeological date 20,000 B.P. means 20,000 Before Present year.
  • During the two minute silence for the memory of D-Day, the NYSE would normally sell $28,000,000 in stock.
  • The Old Man And The Sea is six words of length three.
  • It takes 90 minutes to hard boil an ostrich egg.
  • Big Bird has 4000 feathers.
  • Fifteen million BIC pens are made each day.
  • Leon's 84th anniversary sale ad- No payments for 8.4 months!
  • Wyandotte Art Fair: "The artist has been coming to the annual street fair for the last 7 1/2 years."
  • People are using 79 cent windshield cleaner in place of $1.49 Windex- nice idea, but its a poison!
  • A restaurant in Las Vegas charges $45.00 for an a la carte steak -- only 41 seats in the restaurant.
  • With most duos in a restaurant, one person usually does 80% of the talking.
  • A woman says about 7000 words each day -- a man says 2000.
  • Seventy percent of the new condominiums in Royal Oak were purchased by single women.
  • Rush Limbaugh has gained ten pounds since his show lost nine markets.
  • A box of ten Jos Libertadores cigars costs $58.30.
  • Miller Brewing Company spends $300,000 each year to promote a scholarship fund, which endows $150,000 in scholarships.
  • Only 370,000 hectoliters of lambric (carefully prepared) beer is brewed in all of Europe.
  • Fifteen liters of gas in Japan will cost a traveler $18.53 -- almost $5.00 a gallon.
  • Mercedes-Benz offers a paint job that changes colors depending on one's point of view -- $6600.
  • Comment by a shopper, "They're only open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. They're closed Saturday and Sunday."
  • If 2% or 3% of a junk mailing gets a response it is considered successful.
  • An ad for the Saab 900 claims it has 49 cubic feet of trunk space available to haul away junk mail.
  • You lose one-sixteenth of an inch in height per year after age 30.
  • An 18 ounce box of Wheaties will contain approximately 3450 flakes.
  • You would need 396 million gallons of milk to fill the Skydome in Toronto.
  • The United States Congress suggested that a human life has a minimum value of $7.5 million.
  • There has been one mosh-pit death at a concert in the United States.
  • 400,000 peaches will be distributed to the athletes during the Olympics in Atlanta.
  • America produces 1.43 billion gallons of ice per year -- averaging 46.3 pints per person.
  • Dragonflies are among the fastest insects on wings. They can fly 35 miles per hour.
  • There are ten thousand trillion ants in the world -- they average one to five milligrams -- the total weight of all the ants in the world equals the weight of all the humans on earth.
  • First published in FACTORIAL, a publication of the Detroit Area Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Vol. 28, No. 1.
  • Reprinted in VIRGINIA MATHEMATICS TEACHER, Volume 23, No.3, Spring 1997.


Links:

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Handley Math Home Page