Fermi Questions C

[JustDroobles]

Does anyone have a good in depth list of units that covers all the normal ones and as many obscure units as possible?

These could be good starting points:
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:S ... easurement
There also Wikipedia articles for "Units of Length", "Conversion of Units of Temperature", "Orders of magnitude (mass)" and more if you do a little poking around, as well as sections about units in the main articles for "Mass", "Volume", etc. They have an individual article for each unit of measure as well.

Also, if you are going to attempt memorizing a lot of units, keep in mind to only memorize the scale of the units. You don't need to know that there are 5,280 ft in a mile, just around 5x10^3.

[zimmy1235]

Thank you! I have the scientific notation and most units down I'm more just looking for the obscure units because I've been getting hammered by questions on tests about beardseconds, planck lengths, and such so I wanted to go over those and see what other ones there are.

[al3201]

Also, better know A LOT about your state. Got at least 4 points off, from different questions, for forgetting how far Kansas City is from St Louis.

[OSO]

Just curious, what scores do people usually get, e.g. winners? I just rushed through the quizbowl practice test (<15 minutes) and ended up with the seemingly-mediocre score of 64.

[JustDroobles]

Just curious, what scores do people usually get, e.g. winners? I just rushed through the quizbowl practice test (<15 minutes) and ended up with the seemingly-mediocre score of 64.

This is a tough question because every test and competition is different.I would say if you score points on every question, you should be in good shape for a medal. I suppose you should shoot for around 1/3 to be 5s. But again, this is very sensitive to the test, and who you are competing against.

I don't have much personal context since I only competed in this event at state my senior year. I did a test off against my teammates who were doing poorly in Fermi last April so I could replace them for state, and I won with about 90 out of 150. (So an average of 3 points per question) I went on to medal at state with a 6th place out of 48 teams.

EDIT: Let me also add that on any unit conversions or math problems you should be able to get 5 points, on any estimations like "how many whatevers in a football field" you should be able to get 3 points, and on random knowledge questions you should be able to get 1 point.

[al3201]

I usually aim for an average of 3 points per question, since that is what I usually get for practice tests. I ended up getting 2nd in regionals.

[lmatkovic3]

I've noticed that some of the answer keys are incredibly off, so much that the provided answer cannot be replicated. How should I go about correcting these? For example, on the "Fermi_Practice_Test" the last question reads "In the time that it took me to write this test, how many miles did light travel?" For the given answer to be correct, it would have taken:

3E8*3600*(time in hours)/1000/1.6 miles. The given answer is 12, which would mean that it took the test writer ~2.3 months nonstop to write the test.

[al3201]

Well, if light traveled 5.1E11 (which will be rounded to an answer of 12), it took him about 1 month to write the test. Probably what he wanted to say was the time he wrote the test start to finish, including time while he was doing normal activities.

[tangentline]

Find the bacteria on a toilet seat.

"His studies have found that on the average toilet seat there are 50 bacteria per square inch.
According to Gerba, there are about 10 million bacteria per square inch on a sponge, and a million on a dishcloth.
In other words, a kitchen sponge is 200,000 times dirtier than a toilet seat, and a dishcloth is 20,000 times dirtier."

A what the heck moment for me when I overestimated it by a ton...

Anyways, it's sad that Circuit Lab and Fermi Questions overlap...

[al3201]

How do they overlap? Could you elaborate a bit?

For the toilet seat question----
5?


I would have guessed more if it wasn't for the quote.