3 question IQ test - just for fun!

Peyton Price 17 said:
an electric train is going north at 60 miles an hour and the wind is blowing east at 40 miles per hour, what direction is the smoke going.
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Well, each individual smoke particle is going east at 40 MPH. The entire smoke trail is creating a line that is SSE of the traveling train.
 
RJSakowski said:
A fun fact about question #3. If we assume that a lily pad is about 4" or 10cm across and we start with a single lily pad, what is the size of the lake?
Answer, the lake will have a a surface area of 2.8E12 m^2 or 2.8E6 sq. km (2,800,000 sq. km.). The total surface are of the Great Lakes is 244,106 sq. km. so the size of the lake would be more than ten times the combined size of the Great Lakes. One big lily pond!
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And both of our examples assumed a small lily pad!
 
SLK001 said:
I have a quibble about the third question.

Take a lily pad that is 2" in diameter. After 48 days of doubling, the area covered by the lily pads will be:

(2 * π) * 2^48, or 1.768559 * 10^15 sq inches

or

12,281 billion square feet,

or

440,544 square miles.

​
The surface area of the earth is:

4 * π * r^2, or 4 * π * (8500 miles * 5280 feet/mile * 12 inches/feet)^2, or 3.644837^18 sq inches

or

25,311,370 billion square feet,

or

907,920,399 square miles.

​
The real question should be, how many days before all non-lily life is wiped out by the lilies?
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One error, you used the diameter rather than the radius. Also, googling the diameter, I got 7,917.5 miles. but whose counting?

For my calculation, I assumed that the lily pads weren't overlapping so therefore, each pad would occupy a 10 x 10 cm square. The 10 cm was the result of my observation of local lily pads and rounding to a convenient size. Now, if they were those giant lily pads over a meter in diameter, well then we would have a much more serious problem.
 
RJSakowski said:
One error, you used the diameter rather than the radius. Also, googling the diameter, I got 7,917.5 miles. but whose counting?

For my calculation, I assumed that the lily pads weren't overlapping so therefore, each pad would occupy a 10 x 10 cm square. The 10 cm was the result of my observation of local lily pads and rounding to a convenient size. Now, if they were those giant lily pads over a meter in diameter, well then we would have a much more serious problem.
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Dah! I should have used the area of a circle, or:

π * r^2
​
Since in my case, the area is simply "π", instead of (2 * π), my results are really half of what I stated. Brain fart!
 
The author's "definitive" answer to question #2 was based on an assumption that all readers would interpret it the way he wanted them to. This is an example of what I have called "the destructive power of an unvetted assumption". Or in popular, sarcastic terms: "what POSSIBLY could go wrong???" :).
 
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