_QUESTIONFORMAT_ r'\d+\.'
_ANSWERFORMAT_ STYLE_SINGLE_NUMBER

1. How many asteroid belts would it take to equal the mass of the Kuiper belt?
2
2. How many ways are there to arrange the letters of RICKARDSSCIENCEOLYMPIAD? 
19
3. How many atoms are there combined in all of the people in North America and South
America (including Central America) assuming they are all average adults? 
37
4. An object on Earth freely falls with an acceleration of 10 m/s^2 downwards with no air
resistance. If a person initially at rest were to constantly speed up with this acceleration, but in a
horizontal direction, how long in Svedbergs would it take them to get from the Earth to Uranus?
19
5. Rickards alumnus T-Pain is a well known American music artist and record producer. As of
today, 11/06/2022, what is the average rate of euros per galactic years that T-Pain gained his
net worth since the day he was born?
14

6. You have decided to make a unit grid from your house to James S. Rickards High School.
You plot your house at the origin of your grid and Rickards HS at the point (150, 150). If you can
only go up 1 unit or right 1 unit at a time, how many different paths are there to get from your
house to Rickards HS?
89

7. After careful consideration, you have concluded that SciOly is not for you and you want to go
on the path to be a history major instead. You decide that you want to write the Constitution of
the United States. It took you the time interval between taxation assessments in the Roman
Empire to write the full constitution 1994 times. With the same rate of writing, how many words
of the constitution could you write in the time length of a shake?
-10

8. Kevin is a circuit builder. He has 1000 resistors he wants to put in a circuit. 500 of them are in
series and have values (in ohms) of 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ... , 500^3. The other 500 are in parallel
and have values (in ohms) of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... , 500. For series resistors, RT = R1 + R2 + R3 + ... +
Rn. For parallel resistors, 1/RT = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3 + ... + 1/Rn. What is the equivalent

resistance of the entire circuit in kiloohms? 
7


9. If Joe gives every person in Florida the current minimum wage of Florida for 8 hours a day, 5
days a week for the length of a solar cycle, how much money in US dollars (assuming
population and wage stays constant) would the combined population have earned in that time?
13


10. In a chemical reaction, 50 moles of CO2 and 60 moles of H2O react to form 80 moles of
oxygen gas and 10 moles of pentane (C5H12

). How much heat is absorbed in kilojoules per

mole? 
4

11. Based on the population density of the most densely populated city on Earth, how many
people could cover the entire surface area of the Earth? 
13

12. 3 people are buying SciOly invitational medals at a rate of 5 medals per second each. If
Amazon’s 2021 revenue was evenly distributed among the 3 of them, how long in exaseconds
would it take 1 of the buyers to have spent all of their money? 
-8


13. Germans consume a lot of beer. If the amount of beer sold in Germany in 2021 was
consumed by 1 person, how many Planck lengths would the person have to run to burn all of
those calories? 
48
14. The 2022 FIFA World Cup is coming! The tournament will take place in Qatar during
November and December, because of the excessive heat during the summer. What was the
highest recorded temperature in Qatar ever in degrees Rankine? 
3

15. Argentina is one of the favorites for the World Cup. If half of the people in Argentina were
given a standard soccer/football (association football), then how many hexagons would there
be total from all of the balls? 
8

16. What is the ratio of the height of the Taj Mahal to the height of Burj Khalifa? 
-1

17. How many fortnights ago from today, 11/06/2022, was the first recorded Science Olympiad
competition? 
3

18. What is the number of ways to make change for $50, allowing $2 bills? 
11
19. If the stars in the universe were evenly distributed among all of the galaxies in the universe,
what would be the amount of stars in each galaxy? 
12

20. How many blue whales would it take to line up lengthwise across the diameter of half of the
universe? 
25


21. If the total cost of the 2018 renovation of Rickards HS’ campus was piled up in quarters,
then what would be the weight of the quarters in troy ounces? 
7

22. The test writer making this question is feeling sick currently. Since the start of the COVID-19
pandemic, how many people in the world have recovered from the virus? 
8

23. Maybe after all of these questions, you think to take on the It’s About Time event. What is
the period of a pendulum (on Earth) in Olympiads, given that the pendulum length is 1 foot? 
-8

24. How many pairs of Nike shoes (based on MSRP) would China have to sell to gain their
projected 2027 revenue for all footwear? 
9


25. Sand particles come in varying sizes. How many grains of “fine sand” would it take to fully
fill a cone with radius of 3 feet and a height of 1.83 meters? 
11

26. At what temperature in degrees Celsius does it have the same number for degrees
Delisle? 
2

27. How many pages are there in the AP Calculus Textbook by Ron Larson and Bruce
Edwards? 
3

28. How many characters including spaces are in the last 5 questions combined (this question
is included in the 5)? 
3

29. In an electrochemical cell, dichromate is used as an oxidizing agent for the formation of the
potassium ion. What would be the equilibrium constant of this reaction at standard conditions? [Apparently this is an anticheat problem]
431

30. Andrew Jackson did not win the Presidential election of 1824, although he had the most
popular and electoral college votes. If I say that 1 electoral college vote is equivalent to 5000
popular votes, then how many total popular votes did Andrew Jackson receive? 
6


31. How long ago did the first photosynthesizing cyanobacteria form in lustrums? 
9

32. How many positive integral divisors does the number 27,081,081,027,000 have? 
3


33. What is the value of the 750th Fibonacci number subtracted by the 740th Fibonacci
number? 
156

34. What is the value for the number of ways to arrange a 6 x 6 Rubik’s cube multiplied by the
number of ways to arrange a 4 x 4 Rubik’s cube? 
162


35. Hall has 105 books. How many ways are there for him to order 13 books on a shelf? 
26


36. Emma tracks the progress of a certain second-order chemical reaction by measuring the
concentration of one of the reactants, A, using a device with a detection limit of 0.45 ppm. She
notes that it takes exactly 24 hours for the concentration of A to fall from its initial concentration
of 2 M to 1 M. Given that the molar mass of A is 893.51 g/mol, how many additional hours
would it take for the concentration of A in solution to become undetectable? 
8



37. Reactions with a free energy change of more than around 30 kJ/mol are considered
"irreversible." For such a reaction at 25 degrees Celsius, what is the ratio of products to
reactants at equilibrium? 
5

38. A 60mm long stick of 0.7mm diameter pencil lead weighs 0.04 grams. Assuming that pencil
lead is composed of pure carbon, calculate the average separation, in meters, between the
carbon atoms in pencil lead. 
-10

39. What is the largest number that can be represented using a 64-bit signed integer? 
19

40. How many cents per hour of footage would it cost to to store a 60 fps 4K video on hard
drives? 
2

41. The Library of Babel is a fictional library, described in the Jorge Luis Borges short story of
the same name, that contains every possible book composed of 3,000 characters (limited to the
26 uppercase and lowercase English letters, spaces, and periods). How many books are in the
Library of Babel? 
5197

42. [The Library of Babel is a fictional library, described in the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the same name, that contains every possible book composed of 3,000 characters (limited to
the 26 uppercase and lowercase English letters, spaces, and periods).]
Let x denote the number of books in the Library of Babel as specified in the previous question. Let y denote the number of works on Archive of Our Own, the largest online fanfiction
repository. What is x/y?
5190

43. Consider the following anecdote:

"In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles
and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes
and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the
first second of eternity will be over."
Suppose each time the bird sharpens its beak, one carbon atom is removed from the diamond
lattice. By this definition, how many times longer is one second of eternity compared to an
actual second? 
49

44. Suppose I spent all of my free time over summer break watching Netflix. What proportion of
Netflix's total 2021-2022 viewing time would this constitute? 
-8

45. How many pixels are found in the largest (defined by having the highest pixel count)
photograph of all time? 
12

46. If all of the sand in the world were placed in Lake Erie, then what would be the ratio of
grains of sand per cubic yoctometer? 
-65

47. Wang has 36 big Reese’s Cups he wants to give to 5 people. If everyone must get at least 3
candies, then how many ways can Wang distribute the Reese’s Cups to the 5 people? 
4

48. If the number of cells in the average human body decreased by half in the half-life length of
carbon-14, then how long in hours would it take for 1 cell to remain? 
9

49. As of now, Drake’s most listened to song on Spotify has billions of plays. For how many
jiffies (the physics time unit) has the song been listened to? 
35

50. Convert (AU) * (metric tons)^2 * (nautical leagues)^4 * (shakes) /
(ounces) * (megaparsecs)^2 * (angstroms) * (stones) * (yottaseconds) to meters
-56