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Fermi Questions Wiki
Fermi Questions Test Exchange 2018
Past Threads: 2012, 2013
Past Question Marathons: 2012, 2013

Best event (had a blast proctoring this at MIT last year)!

jkang wrote:Best event (had a blast proctoring this at MIT last year)!

Hey bro! I took the test and placed like 20th haha, but after reading the nats training packet your test included a lot of multistep ones with large exponente and looked very official with appropriate space for each question. I didn't do well, but it was a fun experience

I hope you find more invites to make tests for as they'd be super lucky to have you

Interested in Fermi, but since I have no idea about the magnitudes of anything, it seems really impossibly hard to me.

whythelongface wrote:Interested in Fermi, but since I have no idea about the magnitudes of anything, it seems really impossibly hard to me.

To start, try looking at something like http://www.fermiquestions.com/play to get a feel for the event, and just try to memorize some common values like the diameter of the sun, earth, moon, etc, and make sure to have surface area and volume of a sphere down to compute stuff (70% of earth's surface is water, etc)

NeilMehta wrote:

whythelongface wrote:Interested in Fermi, but since I have no idea about the magnitudes of anything, it seems really impossibly hard to me.

To start, try looking at something like http://www.fermiquestions.com/play to get a feel for the event, and just try to memorize some common values like the diameter of the sun, earth, moon, etc, and make sure to have surface area and volume of a sphere down to compute stuff (70% of earth's surface is water, etc)

Yeah, I have looked at it, and I'm surprisingly okay at it. I mean, I am really inconsistent (either I'm off by 1-2 degrees of magnitude, or I'm off by 7+), so I guess trying out for Fermi wouldn't be the worst idea. Although, without the slider, even GUESSING an answer completely will be much harder...

Anyway, how would you tackle some of the computational ones? I managed to get within one degree of the actual answer, but I tried again for and was off by about 6 degrees...

whythelongface wrote:

NeilMehta wrote:

whythelongface wrote:Interested in Fermi, but since I have no idea about the magnitudes of anything, it seems really impossibly hard to me.

To start, try looking at something like http://www.fermiquestions.com/play to get a feel for the event, and just try to memorize some common values like the diameter of the sun, earth, moon, etc, and make sure to have surface area and volume of a sphere down to compute stuff (70% of earth's surface is water, etc)

Yeah, I have looked at it, and I'm surprisingly okay at it. I mean, I am really inconsistent (either I'm off by 1-2 degrees of magnitude, or I'm off by 7+), so I guess trying out for Fermi wouldn't be the worst idea. Although, without the slider, even GUESSING an answer completely will be much harder...

Anyway, how would you tackle some of the computational ones? I managed to get within one degree of the actual answer, but I tried again for and was off by about 6 degrees...

Try estimating log base 4 of 10 - it's just a bit more than 1.5 (4^1.5=8), so try about 1.7
Then, rewrite the problem as 10^(20/1.7)
That becomes 10^11.7 which can be rounded to 10^12

Pure genius...

Hello SciOly Community

This will be my first year doing Fermi Questions, and I have no clue how I'm meant to study/practice for it.
I went to the link provided earlier in this thread (http://www.fermiquestions.com/play), however, it seems that the website needs to be renewed.
Do you guys have any idea what I should use to study?

Thanks in advance!

PM2017 wrote:Hello SciOly Community

This will be my first year doing Fermi Questions, and I have no clue how I'm meant to study/practice for it.
I went to the link provided earlier in this thread (http://www.fermiquestions.com/play), however, it seems that the website needs to be renewed.
Do you guys have any idea what I should use to study?

Thanks in advance!

Hi!
I'd highly reccomend looking through the Fermi Quesrions Marathon here on the forums, or try one of these:
http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/in ... eila3.html
https://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/edulibrar ... rimary.pdf

In addition, maybe try just setting up large exponents and prepare for pure math questions (2^50, 3^20, etc)