_QUESTIONFORMAT_ r'\d+\.'
_ANSWERFORMAT_ STYLE_SINGLE_NUMBER

1. 2^32


2. 17! 

3. 0.1^89 

4. 50,000,000^(1/9) 

5. 19^19 - 2^4 + 1,000,000^47 

6. If multiple Suns were placed side-by-side, how many would it take to cover the
distance between the locations of the Earth and actual Sun? (Not a trick question,
don’t assume 0)



7. Assuming you are a 180 pound person, how many miles would you have to walk to
burn all the calories from the amount of McDonald's Big Macs you could buy using
the budget of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”?



8. How many water molecules are in 18 mL of water? 

9. About 10,000 tons of Pepe’s frog relatives are eaten each year. If Pepe had an
American penny for each gram of frog eaten, what would be the mass of the amount
of pennies he would have in one year, in grams?



10. Rice University has almost as many trees as undergrads. Hypothetically, if one tree
costs the same amount as one sad Rice undergraduate student’s semester tuition, what
fraction of a tree could you buy with a nickel?



11. To utilize sad Rice Students as a form of energy, a groundbreaking program fitted the
entire undergraduate population in a device that caused them to cry for an entire day.
How much of the Saturn V’s first stage fuel capacity can these sad kids’ tears fill?



12. In 2016, how many pianos were there in the city limits of Houston? 

13. The city of PyeongChang will be hosting this year’s winter Olympics. How many
people will come to see the games?


14. In the human body, how long is the colon, in nanometers? 

15. What number would you get if you multiply the diameter of smallest virus by the
distance light travels in a year?



16. I accidentally left my mini-fridge open last night. Of what fraction of Rice’s total
energy consumption recorded from the last fiscal year did I apparently contribute?



17. How long, in deciseconds, would the “Bee Movie” be if every time the word “bee”
was said, the 4th movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played?



18. A high school senior has given up trying to improve his college essay and tries to run
away from his troubles through pointless activities. For each character of his essay, he
plans to play every key on a piano. If he plays a quarter note at the same BPM as the
number of ridges on an American dime, how long, in seconds, would he be playing
the piano, assuming he plays continuously? Assume the essay is about 500 words.



19. How many Lebron James’s new California mansion can you fit on the largest
ice shelf in Antarctica?



20. How many Etruscan Shrews can you line up along the length of the Gotthard Base
Tunnel?



21. If the area of an NBA basketball court was scaled up to the area of an NFL football
field, what would be the diameter of a men’s basketball if it was increased by the
same scale? Give your answer in yards.



22. Schwarzschild radius, also called gravitational radius, is the radius below which
gravitational attraction between the particles of the body causes irreversible
gravitational collapse, i.e black hole. It is formulated by R = 2GM/c^2. If Stacy’s
mom weighs 55kg, how many Twinkies can you fit in her Schwarzschild radius?



23. An ideal gas is in a solid container with immovable walls, and the initial gas pressure
is 2 atm. If the temperature of the gas in kelvin doubles, what would be the new gas
pressure, in atm?



24. How many rotations are there of all the carbon-carbon single bonds in one mole of
natural gas at room temperature by the time this test is over?



25. Assuming my pet goldfish is immortal and has limitless energy, how fast, in seconds,
would it take for him to travel the shortest distance around the world such that he can
visit all 7 continents?



26. A sad spring semester freshman has given up trying to save his crumbling GPA. In a
frantic attempt to bolster his credentials, he tries to find a research lab to work at by
sending emails to professors once per week for an entire semester. If he attaches his
resume to each email in pdf format, how many gigabytes of information would he
have sent (only from his resumes) by the end of the semester?



27. How many Earths can you fit into the Sun? 

28. I like Despacito and corn burritos. How many Spanish or English words or phrases
also have a similar rhyming pattern?



29. After declaring human’s plans to colonize mars as an illegal act and a violation of
intergalactic border law, the Galactic Federation proposed to close off Earth from
space by building a 1-mile thick carbon fiber shell around it. Estimate the costs of
such an endeavor.



30. What is the number of Science Olympiad alumni/volunteers here at Rice who have
helped make this competition possible raised to the power of the number of writers
for this Fermi test?

9
14
-89
1
282
2
8
24
10
6

-5
5
6
9
8
-8
6
5
8
5


0
-25
0
37
8
-3
6
2
21
5