Saturday, January 19, 2019

Answers to 2017 "Algebra" Problems -- page 1

Note: this is for a group of Students in Minneapolis MN preparing for the 6th grade math challenge. It is not for the general public.

Question #1. Maria and Juan collect coins -- you have the details.

J = 25:  M = 44-25 = 19

Mgold = 19 - 8 = 11  ;  Jgold = 15 - 11 = 4 (answer)

Question #6 Julio starts a savings account -- you have the details.

let M = months.

J = 100 + 50 M   Maria = 1000 + 25 M

100 + 50 M = 1000 +25M   subtract 25 M from both ises and subtract 100 from both sides:

25 M = 900 M = 36 (answer)  Check: 100 +50 times 36 = 1900 and 1000 + 25 times 36 = 1900

Question #4: Ivy thought of a number -- you have the details.

let x be the number:

(2x - 6) divided by 2 = x - 3 : (x  - 3) times 10 + 70 =  10x + 40

10x + 40  divided by 5 = 2x + 8 = 28 solve for x, x = 10 (Answer)

Check: various stages  10 20 14 7 70 + 70 = 140 28

Question # 7  Two acute angles of a triangle are in the ratio 3:2   What are the measures of the two angles.

This is a ratio and sum problem that a student named Kai Alton had a trick for.

Guess any two angles with the correct ratio: for example, 20 and 30. Add them up and get 50.

But we are supposed to get 90. 90 divided by 50 is 1.8.

Multiply each number by 1.8 and get 36 and 54 which are in the right ratio and add up to 90.

Note: 36 is 2 times 18 and 54 is 3 times 18. 36 degrees and 54 degrees (Answer).




Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Soccer, a Beautiful Game of Chance

You will find some references underlined in blue. If you click on that, a blue box will appear. If you click on the URL (begins "http") you will be led to further information.

This is from The New York Times, Science Times section, July 8 2014.

By John Tierney

I’ve been watching the World Cup with some frustrated American social scientists. When they see an underdog team triumph with a miraculous rebound or an undeserved penalty kick, they don’t jump up and scream “Goooaaalll!” They just shake their heads and mutter, “Measurement error.”
If you regard a soccer match as an experiment to determine which team is better, then it’s not much of an experiment. It involves hundreds of skillful moves and stratagems, yet each team averages only a dozen shots, and the outcome is decided by several quick and often random events. In most games, no more than three goals are scored, and the typical margin of victory is a single goal.
To a scientist, the measurements are too few to draw a statistically reliable conclusion about which team is more skilled. The score may instead be the result of measurement error, a.k.a. luck.
That can make soccer seem terribly unfair, at least to many Americans accustomed to higher-scoring sports. We don’t understand why the rest of the world isn’t clamoring for a wider goal or looser offside rules or something to encourage more scoring.
But if the rest of the world took our helpful advice, would soccer really be any fairer? Not necessarily, say the economists and statisticians who have been analyzing the balance between skill and luck in sports and in the rest of life.
Because of fluke goals, low scores and the many matches that end in ties, soccer is less predictable than other major sports, as Chris Anderson and David Sally explain in their soccer book, “The Numbers Game.”
The authors, who are professors at Cornell and Dartmouth, as well as consultants to soccer teams, found that the team favored by bettors won just half the time in soccer, whereas the favorite won three-fifths of the time in baseball and two-thirds of the time in football and in basketball. After surveying the research literature, they concluded that a soccer match’s outcome was about half skill and half luck.
But just because an individual soccer game can be decided by a lucky bounce doesn’t mean that the game is less fair than other sports.
There’s another factor to consider: the paradox of skill, as it’s termed by Michael Mauboussin, an investment strategist and professor at Columbia, in “The Success Equation.”
Suppose the world’s best Scrabble player, which would be a computer, competes against a novice. The computer’s skill will routinely ensure victory even if the novice draws better tiles. But if that computer plays an equally skilled opponent, an identical computer running the same program, then the outcome will be determined entirely by the luck of the draw.
That’s the paradox of skill in sports, business and most other competitions: As the overall level of skill rises and becomes more uniform, luck becomes more important. Mr. Mauboussin has calculated that luck matters less in English soccer’s Premier League than in the N.F.L. and in Major League Baseball, because the American leagues have evened the level of skill among teams by sharing revenue, imposing salary caps and giving better draft choices to the weaker teams.
Soccer in the rest of the world doesn’t have these constraints, so there are much bigger disparities in teams’ skills. In league play, rich clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich buy the best talent. In the World Cup, the larger, more affluent countries can lure the best coaches and draw from a bigger pool of talent.
“Of all the major team sports, soccer is the most unequal in the sense that teams with vastly different resources regularly compete against each other at the highest level,” says Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan and a co-author of “Soccernomics.” If matches were purely contests of skill, the many David-and-Goliath games in soccer would be boring — and seem unfair in another way.
“If you doubled the size of the goal, then soccer would become like basketball, and in a high-scoring game, the rich teams would almost always win,” Dr. Szymanski says. “Randomness favors the underdog. Would we ever want to reduce the role of luck in soccer? No way.”
Still, some forms of soccer luck just seem dumb, like the flip of a coin before a penalty shootout that determines which team goes first in each round. The first kicker makes the shot about three-quarters of the time, which puts pressure on the other team’s kicker to even the score.
That added pressure is presumably why the team going second wins the shootout only 39 percent of the time, according to Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, a game theorist at the London School of Economics and the author of “Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics.”
In experiments with professional soccer players, Dr. Palacios-Huerta found that the odds became more even in a penalty shootout if one team led off in the first and fourth rounds, and its opponent led off in the other three. Dr. Szymanski prefers a different shootout modification to further help the underdog: Let the lower-seeded team go first in all the rounds. Either change sounds like a good idea.
So does an innovation from American sports: peer review. It could reduce the most maddening form of soccer luck, which occurs when a penalty kick is wrongly awarded after a player pretends to be fouled near the goal. No other sport gives players such an incentive to scam the referee. Before awarding a penalty kick that may well decide the match, officials could at least review video replays to make sure the referee saw a foul instead of a flop.
Over the long haul, with enough measurements over the duration of a season or a World Cup, skill does prevail in soccer. The law of large numbers limits the underdogs’ lucky streaks. League championships and the World Cup are repeatedly won by the same few powerhouses, because it takes skill to endure.
But the outcome of any one match is unpredictable enough to confound the most sophisticated computer modelers, as Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado has demonstrated in his evaluation of a dozen forecasts for this World Cup. He found that the “stochastic model” of Goldman Sachs economists and the elaborate Soccer Power Index developed by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight made fewer correct predictions for games in the group stage than did much simpler systems based only on the monetary value of the players or on the teams’ ranking by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.
The best forecasters turned out to be a team at Danske Bank in Copenhagen and a software engineer named Andrew Yuan. But they were still wrong about 16 of the 48 games, and they identified only 11 of the 16 teams to advance past the group stage.
No matter how much number crunching the quants do, no matter how skilled a team is, there’s just no way to anticipate the measurement errors in each match. The forecasters, like the players, may complain about their bad luck, but it’s a fortunate state of affairs for the fans, especially those who root for underdogs like the United States.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Dr. Steve Walks

Why this post? There are three main parts to solving word problems:

1) change the words into math
2) What are they asking for? Look for the question mark! In Minnesota State tests, there can be only one question mark per problem. Not true for this blog. There may be several question marks.
3) Watch out for units! In this problem, distances are in miles but times are in minutes and seconds, and the answer is supposed to be in miles per hour.

The theme of this post is: watch out for units.

The fact that the answers are in miles per hour tells you how to do the problem."Per" means divided by, so the answers are distances in miles divided by times in (fractional) hours. You do have to convert minutes and seconds into fractions of hours or decimal hours.

In later posts, I will try to list all the English words and their math equivalents. For now, "per" always means "divide."

On Tuesday July 1 I walked the first mile in 19 minutes and 20 seconds, and the second mile in 17 minutes and 37 seconds. The total time for two miles was 36 minutes and 57 seconds, and for 2.2 miles, 39 minutes and 4 seconds.

What were my speeds, in miles per hour, for the first mile, the second mile, two miles, and 2.2 miles? (4 answers; round to 2 decimal places.)

On Thursday July 3rd I walked for about 3 miles around the Seward neighborhood with my daughter. She is the mother of my two older grandchildren, who started at Seward Elementary and are now both college graduates and have jobs!

Today, the 4th of July,  I walked the first mile in 19 minutes and 24 seconds, and the second mile in 17 minutes and 37 seconds. The total time for two miles was 37 minutes and 1 second, and for 2.2 miles, 39 minutes and 13 seconds.

Again, what were my speeds, in miles per hour, for the first mile, the second mile, two miles, and 2.2 miles? (4 answers; round to 2 decimal places.)

For example calculations, see the post of June 26 2014. It seems that (usually) first mile is slow, the second mile is faster, two miles is medium fast, and 2.2 miles is faster. The last 2 tenths of a mile are on the flat, and maybe I speed up when the end is in sight. Or, there may be errors in the mile measurements, but I think the 2.2 miles for the whole course is pretty accurate.

Answers in Rot13 -- somewhere on this blog are instructions to decode Rot13:

Whar 1: Svefg zvyr, guerr cbvag bar mreb zcu, frpbaq zvyr guerr cbvag sbhe bar zcu, gjb zvyrf, guerr cbvag gjb svir zcu, gjb cbvag gjb zvyrf, guerr cbvag guerr rvtug zcu.

Whyl 4: Svefg zvyr, guerr cbvag mreb avar zcu, frpbaq zvyr guerr cbvag sbhe bar zcu, gjb zvyrf, guerr cbvag gjb sbhe zcu, gjb cbvag gjb zvyrf, guerr cbvag guerr frira zcu.


Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Length of Day on July 4 2014

On July 4 2014 the Sun will rise in Minneapolis at 5:32 AM and set at 9:03 PM. How long will the day be, in hours and minutes?

Readers will recall that the longest day of 2014, on the summer solstice, was 15 hours and 37 minutes long. You can go to the post archive, to the right, click on June and find the post and the time arithmetic.

You will find that the day on July the 4th will be minutes shorter. Hint: you can count how many minutes on the fingers of two hands.

Fireworks will occur about an hour after sunset: I hope all readers have a happy 4th!


Is Anybody Out There, Part II

I received an email from one Seward parent, so apparently the notification feature is working.

This is a list of all previous posts, which you might want to look at: They are listed in the blog archive, to the right, just click on them to go there. for older posts, click on the month first.

Is Anybody Out There? Introducing email notifications.

Bargain Price For a Dress: Guess the sale price of a dress in 7 guesses or fewer using binary search.

Dr Steve's Walking Speed: doing arithmetic with minutes and seconds.

Correction to previous post: ounces in a pound.

This problem came up in real life: Whole Foods vs. Supervalue.

A Day or So After the Summer Solstice: How long is the day of the Summer Solstice? Time arithmetic with hours and minutes.

"Running the Category" on the Jeopardy! TV Show: sum of arithmetic series.

Another "near miss" of Fermat's Last Theorem: in this and the next post, Bart Simpson writes apparent contradictions to Fermat's Last Theorem on the blackboard. Introduces an on-line scientific calculator which supplies answers with many, many digits if needed.

Higher Math from The Simpsons TV Show: One of the writers is a mathematician, sneaks math into Bart’s blackboard writing.

A Cartoon about Pi

A Problem from Delta Airlines In-flight Magazine: about a tethered cow eating grass.

The Spirit of St. Louis Movie - a good movie for students interested in aviation, navigation, and engineering.

Speed Distance Time: about Charles Lindbergh and great circle navigation.


Dr. Steve's Wife Drinks Latte: about shopping for milk.


"The Magnus Effect" and The World Cup

Most readers of this blog are interested in 1) math & 2) soccer. These two topics are combined in a posting from COMSOL, a leading company in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This is a field I once worked in and has become very advanced since I was involved, but still has big career potential for anyone reading this blog.

Why are there supercomputers? for CFD.

When you see weather prediction maps, they were produced by CFD. And when the forecaster on TV talks about "models" (the European Model vs. the NOAA model) it is CFD that they are talking about.

The link below will take you to a lavishly illustrated CFD article. Just a hint: Bend It Like Beckham  means Beckham is using the Magnus effect.

 http://comsol.com/c/17v9

If for some reason the link above does not work, type http://comsol.com/c/17v9 into your browser.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Is Anybody Out There?

With this blog post, I have introduced a feature where 5 Seward Teachers and 5 Seward parents get a notification of a new post. Blogger limits these notices to 10 people total, but if other people want to sign up, they can, through a "gadget" that lets them subscribe.

This blog post is a test to see if any of the email addresses are wrong.

I don't want to clutter anybody's in-box so if you don't want these notices, just send me an email at:

lastname.firstname@yahoo.com, humans can find my last name and my first name on this very blog, but I hope spam-generating robot web crawlers can not.

The yahoo email is just for Seward and does not contain any personal information.

This is a test. This is only a test.