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Quiz about Everyday Math Dreams
Quiz about Everyday Math Dreams

Everyday Math Dreams Trivia Quiz


Your trigonometry teacher is droning on again, and you find yourself falling asleep in class. You arrive in the world of your strangest fantasies, but soon realize that you haven't escaped the clutches of math! Can you use math knowledge to escape?

A multiple-choice quiz by gamechampionx. Estimated time: 7 mins.
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Time
7 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
320,254
Updated
Jul 23 22
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Tough
Avg Score
6 / 10
Plays
887
Awards
Top 20% Quiz
- -
Question 1 of 10
1. You find yourself wearing a pair of dirty overalls. You take a quick look around and see that you are surrounded by angry pigs. Luckily, some fence boards are lying around, so you attempt to close up the pigs in a pen. However, you're not sure if you have enough boards to fit them all in! What type of rectangular pig pen would provide the greatest area in which to house the pigs? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. Having escaped those crazy pigs, you find yourself in a busy post office. Before you are a set of bins. It's your job to sort mail into each of them, but you've forgotten your reading glasses. Nobody will check your work as long as you only place at most one letter into each bin, so you pick letters at random and start filling the bins. If there are n bins in total and you play your cards right, how many letters does it take before you are found out? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. Though you are found out at the post office, you manage to escape. You find yourself in your grandma's back yard. Unfortunately, the neighbor's dog is looking at you and licking his lips. Luckily, in your back pocket, you find some of the fence boards left over from the pig incident (k of them altogether). If you can find some fence posts, you can build a protective barrier for yourself. If you place the boards end-to-end, connected with a post, and need another post for each end of the fence, how many posts do you need altogether? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. Despite your greatest efforts, the seemingly angry dog breaks through your newly-constructed fence. Luckily, a mysterious portal opens up a short distance away. If you can just get there, you should be safe for the time being. If the world of your dreams is on the surface of a solid spherical planet, which shape, in three dimensions, does your shortest possible path to the portal consist of? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. As the blinding light of the portal fades behind you, all you can see is snow all around you. You walk north for ten miles looking for shelter, but find none, so you decide to turn south. After what seems like an eternity, you have headed ten miles south. Trying to figure out where you are, you wonder how many different locations you could have possibly arrived at, given that your initial position could have been anywhere on the globe. How many possibilities are there? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. You hear a sound coming from above you and see a Yeti floating on a cloud a little ways away, directly above you. He drops a giant snowball from directly above you, and by the time you notice, it's already halfway along the vertical distance between the two of you. If it took one second to get that far, and there's a constant gravitational acceleration and no drag on this dream planet, how much longer will it take before it hits you? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. Suddenly, you can feel warmth emanating from beneath your feet. You look around and notice that the heat source is visible, and is twenty yards away from you. You feel afraid, so you run away from it. A moment later, you find yourself forty yards away. If the heat energy felt from the source is inversely proportional to your distance from it, what was the effect of your motion on the amount of heat energy emitted from below your feet? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. Finally, the snowy scene melts away, and you see a man in a blue robe, covered in gold stars, standing in front of you.

"Are you a magician?" you ask.
"No, I'm a mathemagician!" he replies.

He pulls out a deck of cards and asks you to divide the number of cards in the deck by a half, where most normal magicians would ask you to divide the deck IN half. If it's a standard 52-card deck, how many cards will there be in the end?
Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. The mathemagician congratulates you on your crafty response. A table appears nearby and the man places three cups on it, with a blue, yellow, or red ball under each. Then, he switches them until you are so dizzy that you lose track of where each ball is. Detecting your embarrassment, he cuts you some slack. If you can tell him the chance of randomly guessing where each ball is, he might help you escape this place. What is the probability of randomly guessing the positions of all three balls? Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. The mathemagician is impressed with your skills, and conjures up a portal for you.
"This will lead you back home" he says, smiling, "but you must pass my last test".

"If seven men eat seven apples in seven days, then how long will it take twenty men to eat twenty apples?"
Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. You find yourself wearing a pair of dirty overalls. You take a quick look around and see that you are surrounded by angry pigs. Luckily, some fence boards are lying around, so you attempt to close up the pigs in a pen. However, you're not sure if you have enough boards to fit them all in! What type of rectangular pig pen would provide the greatest area in which to house the pigs?

Answer: A square

With a fixed perimeter, you can optimize the area of a rectangle by making it a square! You can prove this using basic Calculus skills. The boundary cases of rectangles with no width or no height yield no area at all!
2. Having escaped those crazy pigs, you find yourself in a busy post office. Before you are a set of bins. It's your job to sort mail into each of them, but you've forgotten your reading glasses. Nobody will check your work as long as you only place at most one letter into each bin, so you pick letters at random and start filling the bins. If there are n bins in total and you play your cards right, how many letters does it take before you are found out?

Answer: n plus one

This problem is sometimes called the "pigeonhole principle". As soon as there are more items than buckets, some bucket must have at least two items in it.
3. Though you are found out at the post office, you manage to escape. You find yourself in your grandma's back yard. Unfortunately, the neighbor's dog is looking at you and licking his lips. Luckily, in your back pocket, you find some of the fence boards left over from the pig incident (k of them altogether). If you can find some fence posts, you can build a protective barrier for yourself. If you place the boards end-to-end, connected with a post, and need another post for each end of the fence, how many posts do you need altogether?

Answer: k plus one

This concept is sometimes called the "fencepost problem". You need one post for each of the k boards, and one extra to finish the fence off at the very end.
4. Despite your greatest efforts, the seemingly angry dog breaks through your newly-constructed fence. Luckily, a mysterious portal opens up a short distance away. If you can just get there, you should be safe for the time being. If the world of your dreams is on the surface of a solid spherical planet, which shape, in three dimensions, does your shortest possible path to the portal consist of?

Answer: Arc of a circle

It's actually impossible to move in a straight line on a sphere. Instead, the shortest distance between two points can be represented as an arc along the surface of the sphere.
5. As the blinding light of the portal fades behind you, all you can see is snow all around you. You walk north for ten miles looking for shelter, but find none, so you decide to turn south. After what seems like an eternity, you have headed ten miles south. Trying to figure out where you are, you wonder how many different locations you could have possibly arrived at, given that your initial position could have been anywhere on the globe. How many possibilities are there?

Answer: An infinite number

If you start at ten miles south of the north pole, then from your first destination, every way is south! You can end up anywhere within a ring of the planet's surface. In all other cases, there is only one possibility. Regardless, considering all possibilities for your starting location, the number of possible final locations is infinite.
6. You hear a sound coming from above you and see a Yeti floating on a cloud a little ways away, directly above you. He drops a giant snowball from directly above you, and by the time you notice, it's already halfway along the vertical distance between the two of you. If it took one second to get that far, and there's a constant gravitational acceleration and no drag on this dream planet, how much longer will it take before it hits you?

Answer: Less than one second

When objects fall and are pulled downward by gravity, they accelerate downward: their downward velocity increases. Hence, the snowball will fall more quickly during the second half of its descent.
7. Suddenly, you can feel warmth emanating from beneath your feet. You look around and notice that the heat source is visible, and is twenty yards away from you. You feel afraid, so you run away from it. A moment later, you find yourself forty yards away. If the heat energy felt from the source is inversely proportional to your distance from it, what was the effect of your motion on the amount of heat energy emitted from below your feet?

Answer: It has been halved

If heat energy (call it E) is inversely proportional distance from the heat source (call it d), then there exists a constant (call it k) such that:

E = k * (1/d)

Now, if we let d' = 2d, we have:

E' = k * (1/d')
= k * (1/(2d))
= (1/2) * k * (1/d)
= (1/2) E

where E' is the new energy value.
8. Finally, the snowy scene melts away, and you see a man in a blue robe, covered in gold stars, standing in front of you. "Are you a magician?" you ask. "No, I'm a mathemagician!" he replies. He pulls out a deck of cards and asks you to divide the number of cards in the deck by a half, where most normal magicians would ask you to divide the deck IN half. If it's a standard 52-card deck, how many cards will there be in the end?

Answer: 104

When you divide a number by a fraction between 0 and 1, the number actually gets bigger! Dividing a number in half and dividing it by a half are actually inverse operations.
9. The mathemagician congratulates you on your crafty response. A table appears nearby and the man places three cups on it, with a blue, yellow, or red ball under each. Then, he switches them until you are so dizzy that you lose track of where each ball is. Detecting your embarrassment, he cuts you some slack. If you can tell him the chance of randomly guessing where each ball is, he might help you escape this place. What is the probability of randomly guessing the positions of all three balls?

Answer: 1 in 6

The first cup can be any of the three balls, leaving two possibilities for the second and only one for the third. Hence, the total number of possibilities is 3 x 2 x 1 = 3! = 6.
10. The mathemagician is impressed with your skills, and conjures up a portal for you. "This will lead you back home" he says, smiling, "but you must pass my last test". "If seven men eat seven apples in seven days, then how long will it take twenty men to eat twenty apples?"

Answer: Seven days

If it takes one man a day to eat one apple, two men can eat two apples total in the same day. The same idea applies here.
Source: Author gamechampionx

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor crisw before going online.
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