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The Division B test was crazy. The event supervisor was letting people talk to other teams by the end of it, and was literally talking to one of the teams at the beginning. The test itself was almost the same difficulty as our regional test, and much easier than our state test.

The tiebreaker was impossible, though. It was basically "how much gold has been produced in the world in history," and "given that a troy ounce of gold is $1600, what is the current value of all that gold." I just checked wikipedia, and the question was taken from one paragraph in that.

At the end of 2009, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 165,000 tonnes.[2] This can be represented by a cube with an edge length of about 20.28 meters. At $1,600 per ounce, 165,000 tons of gold would have a value of $8.8 trillion.

-Wikipedia

havendude wrote: The tiebreaker was impossible, though. It was basically "how much gold has been produced in the world in history," and "given that a troy ounce of gold is $1600, what is the current value of all that gold." I just checked wikipedia, and the question was taken from one paragraph in that.

Yeah, IKR?!? We didn't do the tiebreakers until later, but when I saw the $ symbol on the answer page I was thinking oh shoot, this won't be good. The rest of the test was really easy.

We thought it was incredibly easy, and so did many of the people we talked to. We got 18th, which was a little worse than we expected, given that we'd known almost every answer. It seems like there were so many people who'd done well, that it went to whoever got the closest on the tiebreaker.

lol just wondering, would "enough to fit into three olympic-sized swimming pools" be accepted?

also, how often have you seen r&m tests where 90% of the questions have been taken from wikipedia?

I believe that the tiebreaker said that the answer had to be to the nearest metric ton, so being closest wouldn't have done much...besides, we got first and we were a couple billion off the first and six trillion off the second

havendude wrote:The Division B test was crazy. The event supervisor was letting people talk to other teams by the end of it, and was literally talking to one of the teams at the beginning. The test itself was almost the same difficulty as our regional test, and much easier than our state test.

The tiebreaker was impossible, though. It was basically "how much gold has been produced in the world in history," and "given that a troy ounce of gold is $1600, what is the current value of all that gold." I just checked wikipedia, and the question was taken from one paragraph in that.

At the end of 2009, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 165,000 tonnes.[2] This can be represented by a cube with an edge length of about 20.28 meters. At $1,600 per ounce, 165,000 tons of gold would have a value of $8.8 trillion.

-Wikipedia

I didn't realize that Rocks and Minerals had suddenly turned into Fermi Questions.

Seriously, that value doesn't really have a place in a Nationals Rocks and Minerals test. My partner and I thought that the test was way too easy, but can't complain

Honestly, my partner and I thought the room was too small. A bigger room would have meant more stations would have been possible, so more questions and less time for each station. The questions themselves weren't so bad, I guess, but there just weren't enough of them...

^ We loved the test.

I am going to start composing my binder and researching in a few weeks. I cant wait for SO.