Things I Learned While Reading This Summer (1996)

(and will use to develop problems for my class)   by Dick Sietz

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.

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• 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.