In The News... - The Problems
August 4, 2008 Last week, California experienced an earthquake that measured 5.4 on the Richter scale. The USGS estimates that there are 3 million earthquakes every year, most are just too slight to feel or occur in uninhabited locations. If 3 million earthquakes occur every year, on average how many earthquakes occur in one month?
How many occur each day during a regular (non-leap year) year? Express your answer as a decimal to the nearest tenth.
Scrabulous, a popular online version of Scrabble, was forced to close to American and Canadian use due to a lawsuit over copyright issues. Not only was the name too similar to Scrabble’s for Hasbro’s liking, the board and pieces were identical to Scrabble’s board and pieces. Selena is going to randomly draws 3 letter tiles without replacement from a full set of Scrabble letter tiles (the number of tiles containing each letter is shown below). What is the probability that she draws the letters B-L-E in order (the letters removed from “Scrabble” before -ulous was added to create “Scrabulous”)? Express your answer as a common fraction. A-9 B-2 C-2 D-4 E-12 F-2 G-3 H-2 I-9 J-1 K-1 L-4 M-2 N-6 O-8 P-2 Q-1 R-6 S-4 T-6 U-4 V-2 W-2 X-1 Y-2 Z-1 Blank-2
It was one week before the commencement of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and the city was still covered in thick smog. In an effort to improve air quality, China adopted a restricted driving policy that keeps 1/3 of its vehicles off of the road on any given day. If air quality does not improve, China plans to use measures to further reduce the number of vehicles on the road by 10% of the already decreased level. If this measure is put in place, by what percent will the original number of vehicles theoretically be reduced?
The solutions to this week's problems will be posted in the archive on Monday, August 11th, 2008.
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