20 Questions to test SIMS students knowledge of large and small numbers:

(You may not use a calculator to do any of the math.)

Student Name: _________________________________________ 1. 37 billion is how many millions?

37 thousand million... 1 billion is 1000 million....so 37,000,000,000 is 37 billion...which is 37,000 million

2. 0.34 billion is how many millions?

340 3. 3 MB is how many Kb? [Remember: 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (b).]

3,000 Kilobytes

4. If a song takes about 3MB to store on an iPod, how many songs of that size can be stored on an MPG player with 6GB memory?

2048 5. Consider a warehouse storage room, with dimensions of 10 feet high x 10 feet wide x 10 feet long, that is completely filled up with boxes that have dimensions of 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot. If it takes you 60 seconds to remove one box and put it on a large tractor truck trailer, how many minutes will it take to remove all the boxes in the room to the trailer? I think 1000 6. If a file takes 15 seconds to transfer across a 1Gbps LAN, how many minutes will it take to transfer that same file across a 10Mbps LAN (if all else is equal)?

1000/10=100. a 10Mbps connection is 100 times slower than a 1Gbps connection, all other things being equal. 100 times as long. 100x15=1500 seconds = 25 minutes. Figures are approximate.

About 1500seconds, about 25 minutes. 7. If a complex computer operation can be done on a CPU in 2 microseconds, how many will be able to be done in one millisecond?

8. If you were given a million dollars and then had to give half of it back, how much money would you still have? 9. If the annual federal deficit is $4 trillion this year and there are 100 million households in this country, what is the average debt load created per family for that year that will have to be paid back in the future? 10. The U.S. congress is considering giving every taxpayer a $1000 tax refund stimulus payment. To pay for these stimulus refunds, they will use money that was instead earmarked to build neighborhood medical clinics for the poor in socio-disadvantaged neighborhoods. These medical clinics will cost $13 million each to build. There are $130 million taxpayers who will all be getting these economic stimulus payments. How many medical clinics will not get built in order to fund this economic stimulus package?

11. How many nanoseconds are in one picosecond? .001 12. How many picoseconds are in one microsecond?

1 microsecond= 1000000*picosecond

13. If a $1000 dollar bill is the thickness of a normal piece of paper and a ream (500 sheets) of normal paper is 3 inches thick, answer the following three questions: a. A stack of $1000 bills will equal a million dollars when it is how high? b. Keep stacking those thousand dollar bills. How high will the stack be when it is contains one billion dollars? (express your answer in feet) c. Keep stacking those thousand dollar bills. About how high will the stack be in order to equal the annual federal deficit of $4 trillion? Express your answer in miles. (Factoid #1: 100 miles is about 500,000 feet.) (Factoid #2: outer space is considered to begin at 62 miles up.)

14. If a swimming pool contains 60 million gallons and it takes 1000 minutes (60,000 seconds) to pump it out using the new ACME Brand-X heavy duty pump, what is the bandwidth of the pump?

15. If you have a $1000 investment that loses 50% of its value in the first month and then gains back 50% of its remaining value in the second month, how much money will your investment be worth at the end of the second month?

16. If 40 people are in a group that are splitting a $40 million lottery, but 50% of the lottery winnings are paid back in taxes, what is the after tax take home amount each person in the group will get?

17. If a DVD contains about 5GB of data, and it takes you 50 seconds to carry a box of 10 DVDs to the guy who asked for them down the hall, what was your bandwidth for this movement of data? Express your answer in Mbps. (Assume 1B = 8b)

18. What is the answer to the following mathematical division problem? (6MB/0.003GB) = 2 19. Consider a 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter cube of plastic. If this 1 cubic meter of plastic is cut into cubes that are 1 centimeter x 1 centimeter x 1 centimeter, and then if you placed all those 1 cubic centimeter cubes one-after-one next to each other in a straight line, how long would that line be in miles (to the nearest mile)?

20. If you had a computer that could do a calculation in one nanosecond, how many calculations could that computer do in 10 seconds? Similar If a computer does five calculations in a nanosecond then how many calculations does it do in a second? Answer:
5 billion