Games

Until we get this up and running, Julie will talk about some problems she has her History students try to help make the impact of war (and time) sink in with her students. If you have questions, you can e-mail her.
  • Calculate how many days it would take, counting one number per second, to count to one million
    • ** How many days-worth of people died in WWII (like if we were going to honor each person with one second of silence)?
    ** If we condense years into seconds, how old is the Earth in days (or years)?

    While I would like to say I've always liked math (I REALLY didn't), it does come in handy in places you might not expect it! (and you get better at it when you use it in fields you actually DO understand)
Scroll down for answers.

 

 

 

 

Question: Calculate how many days it would take, counting one number per second, to count to one million.
Answer: Mathematically, the key is multiplying by versions of "1" since we know that we can multiply anything by 1 and just get the same anything back (in other words, it MEANS the exact same thing). In this case, versions of "1" are fractions of equivalent times: one minute equals sixty seconds, for example. In the end, we just need to make sure the appropriate units cancel out. Since the question tells us we need to equate days and seconds, those are the only two units we want left. Once we have an equation that equates seconds and days, we can multiply that equation by 1000000; just make sure that seconds is on the bottom so that it cancels out the seconds that go with 1000000.
60 seconds X 60 minutes X 24 hours = 86400 seconds ; 1x106 seconds x 1 day = 11.57 days
minute hour day day   86400 seconds
(1x106 means "1 with 6 zeros after it")

** Wikipedia tells us that approximately 72 million military personnel and civilians died as a result of WWII. (s=seconds, d=days, m=months, y=years)
11.57407 d x 7.2x106 s = 833.33 d = 1 y = 2.28 y ( 0.28 y x 12 m = 3.4 m)
1x106 s   365.25 d y
So, we'd need 2 years, 3 months, and about 11 days of silence, with one second per person, to honor all of the people who died in WWII. How's that for food for thought?

** I'm not going to calculate this one out for you, but given that Wikipedia says Geologists believe the earth is 4.54×109 years old, if we switched years to seconds (meaning that we're only looking at 1 out of every 3x107 seconds) I calculated that the world would (still!) be 143 years, 10 months, and 11 days old. I think it's still pretty hard to grasp what that means. Sometimes thinking about these numbers in terms of earning-power helps. If the average household income is $46,326, it would take almost 681 years for the average household to earn the same amount of money as there are seconds in one year (31536000 seconds/year) - and to total the age of the Earth, you'd have to do that almost 144 times; work for ~98,000 years to earn the same amount of money as the earth is old in years (hopefully you'll get some raises!).