MIT Invitational 18-19
40
It’s winter time and the MIT Invitational is today! You wake up (hopefully) and get your clothes out of your suitcase to change. How many Earths can fit inside the volume of a typical carry-on-sized suitcase?
-23
It’s really really cold so you put on your leather jacket. How many cow’s hide were used for that one jacket?
0
Unfortunately, now you have a cold too. You sneeze really hard! What’s the ratio of the maximum distance that a sneeze can travel to the distance from Austin, TX to Anchorage, AK?
-5
You head down to eat breakfast that the hotel provided for you, buttering up a nice few pieces of toast. How many calories are in a cubic light year of butter?
55
One of your teammates forgot to print their note sheets last night. Oh no! They’re trying to figure out the hotel’s printer right now. How many HP 564 Original ink cartridges would you need to print 1 billion pages of yellow text?
6
You finish breakfast and board your school’s vans to campus. How much gasoline is used in the entire United States in one day in gallons?
8
You go to the room for the Fermi Questions event and the supervisor says you may begin. The first question on the test reads “How many picoyears of the sun’s energy would it take to emit as much energy as a passive (not active or moving) lion does in 5 seconds?” How many petayears of the sun’s energy would it take to emit as much energy as a passive (not active or moving) lion does in 5 seconds, assuming a lion is a perfect blackbody?
-45
You’re halfway through the test and you think “This test is so dumb. Where are the questions that are like ‘What’s 7 raised to the 34th power?’” What’s 7−34?
-29
You finish the test and feel decently confident, probably not a top 4 finish, but somewhere above average, maybe even placing 5th or 6th! What place are you getting today, assuming you place how you feel you will?
1
Because you are a competitor of culture, you only compete in Inquiry & Nature of Science events. Let X be the set of letters contained in the combined names of all 2018 Inquiry & Nature of Science events. How many English words only contain letters in X?
5
You’re now finished with your events, so you decide to explore MIT a bit. Somehow, you get a bit lost and stumble across MIT Men’s Volleyball practice. What is the ratio of the spiking speed of an Olympic Volleyball player to the orbital speed of our solar system around the galactic center?
-4
MIT staff screams at you and kicks you out because you’re not allowed in there. How many times more powerful is a person’s scream than a bat’s echolocation?
-5
You use Google’s “Google Maps” application to find your way back to the homeroom. If Google decided to hire all current undergraduate MIT students for full-time positions (and they all accepted), what percent would their number of employees increase?
1
You’re finally on the way back to the hotel to chill for a bit before the awards ceremony and dinner. Assuming all competitors and coaches are staying in hotel rooms, what percent of US hotel rooms are MIT Invitational competitors and coaches occupying?
-2
You and your roommates turn on the TV to find that “Spongebob Squarepants” is on. In February of 2002, what was the viewership of “Spongebob Squarepants”?
8
Although a great show, you decide to spend your time on Reddit. If Reddit’s monthly population (the number of unique visitors to Reddit each month) all stood side-by-side, tightly packed, how many Asia’s would be needed to fit all of them?
-5
Because Reddit only contains content of the highest quality, you come across the script for the Bee Movie. How many characters are in the Bee Movie script?
5
You go back to campus and its time for the award ceremony! You see Kresge Auditorium and, amazed at the engineering, you are reminded of MIT’s mascot, the beaver. How many aspen trees could a beaver gnaw down in the gestation period of a beaver, assuming it never stops and always works at peak performance?
4
You remember last year’s award ceremony and how Admissions Officer Chris Peterson stalled for quite some time for Game On to be finished grading. You really hope that doesn’t happen again. In the amount of time the entire 2017 MIT Invitational award ceremony took (from introduction by the co-directors to passing out team packets, this includes the keynote speech), how many times could you have flown nonstop from Honolulu, HI to Beijing, China?
-1
Unfortunately, the awards ceremony has been going on, you haven’t placed and your last event, Write It Do It, is coming up. You really want that medal and at this point you’d even pay for it. How much Ethereum would it cost to purchase a 2016 Rio Summer Olympics gold medal?
1
You’re upset because you and your school didn’t place as well as you expected and you start to bawl. Every day, you cry as many times as the average adult male cries in a month. Every time you cry, you drink a liter of Diet Coke. In the time span of a month, how many grams of caffeine would you have consumed from this Diet Coke?
1
You feel like you’ve just been rejected by MIT Suppose you had as many mitochondria of the largest size possible as the number of first-year applicants rejected by MIT Admissions for the Class of If you lined all these mitochondria up, how many times could they fit around the moon?
-8
You’re kinda mad and the only one to blame is 1st place. Somehow this Troy school won without even being at the competition??? Who are they anyways??? If barbell weight sets equal to the number of Google search results when you search “Troy High School” are packed into a sphere the size of Earth, how dense would this sphere be in grams per cubic centimeter?
-14
Whatever. It’s time to go out to dinner. Y’all decide to go out to hot pot at the Happy Lamb. If the amount of sheep killed for food in Australia each year were used for wool instead, how many pounds of wool could you get that year (assuming each sheep does produce wool and it produces the most wool it possibly can)?
9
You’re having a great time at hot pot because it’s, ya know, hot pot. There’s also a few vegetarians on the team who have fun pointing out things like “beef tongue” and such. Unfortunately, there’s only so much variety for them. Napa cabbage prefer a certain soil pH in order to obtain sufficient calcium, magnesium, and other nutrients. How much more concentrated are hydrogen ions in this perfect soil than in a 1 M solution of acetic acid?
-4
For some reason the restaurant can’t split the bill between you and your 14 teammates, so you’re going to pay it all yourself first. You’re not even surprised when you see the bill because wow this stuff is pretty expensive. With the amount of money spent by all of China on eating out in 2016, how many Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards can you buy, assuming you only buy booster packs?
3
Your team is going out to eat ice cream after this too. Yay! How many more ice cream flavors does Baskin Robbins have than Blue Bell?
2
Unfortunately, one of your other teammates is lactose-intolerant. How many grams of lactose are in 1 gallon of unprocessed cow’s milk?
9
To end the night, you and many of your teammates decide to pirate some movies to watch. With the estimated amount of money the film industry has lost to piracy, how many Echo Dots could you have bought on Black Friday 2018?
5
For some reason, y’all first decide to pirate “Moana” which happens to be on Netflix too, so y’all didn’t even have to pirate it! How many seconds would it take to play all the movies owned by Disney that were released in 2016 back to back?
2
You end up staying up pretty late and your flight home is decently early. You end up getting 32 hours of sleep. How many times can you fit the record amount of time gone without blinking in the record amount of time someone has lasted without sleep?
2
So you wake up extremely early only to find that your flight home has been delayed by a massive amount due to some random big thunderstorm. How many thunderstorms occur on Earth every week?
5
You hate waiting. This long wait reminds you of the time you went to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China. Based solely on admissions percentage (assuming no acceptance limit), how many of the people attending the 2010 Shanghai World Expo on its peak day would be accepted into the 2019 MIT Research Science Institute (RSI) if they all applied?
4
After a while you finally get on the plane and are given some complimentary peanuts to make up for the incredible delay. How many peanut butter sandwiches could you make with all the peanuts growing on an average peanut farm?
7
You’re thankful for the excellent service your flight attendants are giving you and you realize how privileged you are. You also feel kinda sad that these people aren’t even making that good money yet they are serving you. How many MIT students could you pay one-year tuition (not including room and board) for if you worked for 100 years, with a 40 hour work-week, at minimum wage (not along the US-Mexico border) in Mexico, assuming they have no scholarships or financial aid?
1
Motivated by this, you go home and back to school in a few days with thoughts of changing the world. You want to start a Habitat for Humanity club at your school. How many communities in the US does Habitat for Humanity operate in?
3
Turns out your school already has a Habitat for Humanity club, wow! So you decide to join and over time you go volunteer a lot and help out the community in many ways – building houses, connecting water supplies, etc. How many seconds could you continuously shower if you had all the rain that fell over the US during Hurricane Harvey?
15
This in turn leads you to a new passion for the engineering events in Science Olympiad. You decide to try and pick up the “Boomilever” event. How much load can a boomilever with a mass of a TI-84 graphing calculator and the efficiency of the 2014 Division C national champion boomilever hold in ounces, assuming the national champion boomilever did in fact break?
4
With some advice from one of the main builders on your team, your first boomilever scores pretty well in efficiency. If your boomilever efficiency was 1140, how many high school seniors taking the SAT in 2017 with intended engineering majors scored higher than that?
5
So excited, you even decide to stop doing Inquiry & Nature of Science events to pursue your true passion in engineering. Eventually, you decide to major in engineering in college. In your introductory engineering class, they emphasize the importance of being able to give good estimates of reasonable values. Here is the first test question they ask you: How many golf balls can fit in this room?
6
