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cryo wrote: ↑September 6th, 2022, 8:49 pm How many words will Science Olympiad students write this season?
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure if my answer to this is right, but we'll see if y'all agree.)

In competitions, for all of Science Olympiad (includes binders etc.), or in their whole lives (includes schoolwork etc.)?

Number of words written for a test question varies between 0 (multiple choice & calculation questions) and whole paragraphs.

So let's say 1e5 tests in the year (following previous question) times maybe an average of 30 written questions per test, times a 20 word sentence per question would make the answer 8.

Sorry for not responding! My intention was for all of Science Olympiad this season, but it wasn't worded very well. I think that's about right when just considering tests - I think I'd go a little lower (see spoiler below), but that works. Your turn! Some events just don't have writing (builds, Fermi...) and some generally don't have much writing (e.g. anatomy, rocks). The upper bound might be limited by how fast people type/write. My guess would be more like 10-15 questions per test that need a sentence or explanation, which would put that just on the border of 7-8 with the actual test numbers.

OK - let's try something different.

What is the total mass of the cars in the US (in kilograms)?

[hide]
1000 kg per car x 300 mil Americans x 0.5 per person = 11[/hide]

In the US, there are around 350 million people, and around 1 in every 2 people will have a car. This means there are around 175 million cars in the US. if each car is around 1000 kgs, the total mass of cars in the US is around 1.75e11 making the answer 11.

Yeah, I think that's the answer. The numbers change a little depending on whether you count trucks as cars or not, but not enough to make it different from 11.

cryo wrote: ↑September 6th, 2022, 8:49 pm How many words will Science Olympiad students write this season?
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure if my answer to this is right, but we'll see if y'all agree.)

Just wanted to throw in a personal take on it, same sort of answer but slightly different reasoning

Restarting this marathon because I think it's interesting! My question: how many transistors are there in the world?
(This is pretty hard to estimate, so a little off is fine.)