Here’s a fun new way to learn math. For more interesting problems, check out the website www.bedtimemath.org
There are certain weird foods where you really wonder who first got the crazy idea to try eating it. But somewhere along the line, someone decided to take the gummy stuff out of a tree and chew on it. Gum is naturally made in trees – it’s the resin or sap from inside the trunk – and as much as 9,000 years ago humans were chewing the gum from birch trees. Since then it’s become all the rage, with 374 trillion sticks of gum now made every year. They say you “can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” but given how much gum gets chewed, hopefully they’ve figured out how by now.
Wee ones: If you’ve been chewing a stick of gum for 3 minutes and chew it for another 4 minutes before it loses its flavor, for how many minutes do you chew in total?
Little kids: Bubble gum comes in a bigger, stretchier wad that can be blown out into a bubble. If you try 12 times to blow a bubble and you succeed 1/3 of the time, how many bubbles do you blow? Bonus: The largest bubble-gum bubble ever blown was 23 inches wide. If your head is 7 inches wide, how much wider than your head was that bubble?
Big kids: Apparently Americans chew an average of 300 sticks of gum per person each year. If you chewed at that rate, how many sticks would you chew each month? Bonus: The record for continuous gum chewing is 135 sticks over 8 hours. Assuming he chewed 1 less stick during the final hour than each of the previous 7 hours, how many sticks did he chew each hour?
Answers:
Wee ones: 7 minutes.
Little kids: 4 bubbles. Bonus: 16 inches wider.
Big kids: 25 per month (close to 1 per day). Bonus: 17 sticks per hour.