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1.  Thousands of tourists visit the Grand Canyon each year. How many pounds of
water are required to fill the entire canyon?
2.  Selfies are one of the most common types of photographs. How many selfies are
estimated to be taken globally in one day?
3.  I’ve never understood why chocolate is associated with love... How many pounds
of chocolate were bought during Valentine’s Day week in 2023?
4.  India has one of the lowest rates of meat consumption per capita, while the U.S.
has one of the highest. On average, how many people from India would you need to
match the yearly meat consumption of the entire US population?
5.  Columbia recently made a gaming lounge, outfitted with some of the newest and
fastest PC hardware on the market (all the more reason to come to Columbia)! How many
operations does an NVIDIA RTX 4090 TI GPU (the top-end consumer available
GPU as of 2023) perform per second?
6.  2023 was a big year for Taylor Swift – TIME person of the year, a billion-dollar
tour, and Spotify’s top artist, to name some achievements. What is the product of all of
Taylor Swift’s ex and current boyfriends’ heights (in feet)?
7.  Did you know chinchillas have the densest fur (in terms of number of hairs per unit
area) out of all mammals? How many more times dense is a chinchilla’s fur compared
to the average human head?
8.  Chess is far from being a “fully solved” game, but we’re slowly making progress. In
2018, computer scientists finally finished tabulating all possible positions with 7 or fewer pieces
left on the board. How many legal chess positions can be created using 7 or fewer
pieces? Remember that a “legal position” must contain two kings, pawns can’t be on the first
or last rank, etc.

9.  2024 means another U.S. presidential election year! If you took all U.S. presi-
dents that have an “e” somewhere in their full name and multiplied their number

n together (where they are the n-th president), what number would you get? – e.g.
Thomas Jefferson x Joe Biden = 3 * 46 = 138.
10.  The speedrunning community loves the original 1985 Super Mario Bros. game, on
Nintendo’s NES console. How many frames (ran on original NES) does it take to
complete Super Mario Bros., based on the current world-record fastest speedrun?

11.  You ever think about how physics-defying Carl’s house is in the movie Up? He
always managed to keep exactly the right number of balloons attached to the house for it to
float one foot o↵ the ground. How many standard balloons, filled with helium, would
you need to lift the Empire State Building?
12.  Did you know that it’s a kicker that holds the all-time high for career points in the
NFL? What is the product of the highest number of career points scored in the
NBA, career goals scored in the NHL, career points scored in the NFL, and career
runs scored in the MLB? (By career points, we mean the number of points scored across a
single player’s entire playing career).
13.  Spider silk is remarkably strong – however, we haven’t quite figured out how to
create web fluid, so no swinging around like Spiderman yet. How many times greater is
the tensile strength of spider silk compared to that of steel? Note that tensile strength
is measured by stretching a material until it breaks.
14.  Many people dream of traveling the world, and some of them also dream of trying
every item on the McDonald’s menu... people have di↵erent tastes I guess. How many
times could you go around Earth’s circumference, by lining all of the burgers that
McDonald’s sells (globally) in one year? Assume the burgers are placed along the equator.

15.  In Percy Jackson, Delphi Strawberry Service is the cover name for Camp Half-
Blood. The cost of constructing a temple dedicated to one god at the camp requires selling a

16-wheeler truckload of strawberries. If each of the major Greek gods were to receive
a temple, how many pounds of strawberries would the camp have to sell?

16.  In 1946, Enrico Fermi was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by
Columbia for his discovery of nuclear reactions. Since 1896, how many degrees has
Columbia University awarded in total?
17.  Some of you have traveled from very far to come to today’s Science Olympiad! If
you summed all of the direct distances (“as the crow flies”) between Columbia and
each school at today’s invitational, what would the total distance be in kilometers?
18.  Low Library (the big domed building in the middle of campus) isn’t actually library
anymore! In 1934, all books were removed and moved to Butler Library. At full capacity,
how many books was Low Library expected to accommodate?
19.  Columbia’s campus is very small - I can walk to any of my classes in less than 5
minutes! If you combined the land across all Ivy League school main campuses
(exclude any land owned outside of the main campuses), how many of Columbia’s
main campus could fit in this area?
20.  Do you all think the Columbia classroom chairs are comfy? How many chairs
are there within all the registrar-managed classrooms on Columbia’s campus?

21.  (Physics) A common joke about particle physics research is how we keep needing to
construct bigger particle accelerators to make any new discoveries. How many times more
powerful is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN compared to the first cyclotron
ever made by Ernest Lawrence back in 1931?
22.  (Physics) Brian and I were lucky enough to watch Oppenheimer at an IMAX 70mm
theatre last summer. Assuming you only account for the projector and sound system,
how many times could an IMAX movie theatre play Oppenheimer using solely the
energy from the 1945 Trinity nuclear test’s explosion?
23.  (Astronomy) Did you know there will be a total solar eclipse that goes directly
through the continental US on April 8, 2024? If you witnessed a solar eclipse, about how
many blue moons (the 2nd full moon occurrence in a calendar month) would you
see until you saw another solar eclipse, still standing at the exact same spot?
24.  (Chemistry) Have you seen the famous Mentos and Soda experiment? If you dump
Mentos into a bottle of soda, the carbon dioxide bubbles expand rapidly, creating a geyser. If
you put a single Mento into a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke, how many bubbles are
produced in the resulting geyser?
25.  (Biology) Villains are always saying creepy things like, “this sword was forged from
the blood my enemies.” Assuming perfect extraction, how many human men would
you need to extract enough iron to create a full medieval broadsword?

26.  How many digits in pi do you need to get the first instance of 123456789?
27.  A rabbit is traveling from (0, 0) to (24, 24) by hopping one unit in the
positive x or positive y direction each step. However, there is a snake at each
lattice point where both coordinates are odd, e.g. (1, 1) or (1, 3). How many paths
can the rabbit take without encountering a snake?
28.  Let’s talk about telescoping. What is SQRT(1 * SQRT(5 * SQRT(25 ...)))

29.  The prime factorization of 2024 is 2^3 * 11 * 23. What is the sum of all
positive numbers less than 20242 that are divisible by all of 2, 11, and 23?
30.  What is the maximum number of regions that a circle can be partitioned
into by drawing 100 lines?

16
8
8
10
14

8
2
14
42
4

10
15
0
1
6

6
3
6
2
4

8
5
2
7
2

9
6
1
10
4