Mathgeek’s Mathhelp

Fun problem for this week. The monthly challenge will be out on Wednesday.

What is 120*12.0 using the correct number of significant digits?

The answer to last week’s problem was 1

Fun problem this week, based on slope:

What is the slope of the line that has y-intercept of -20 and an x-intercept of 20?

The answer to last week’s problem was 1, please notify me for an explantion.

I do apologize for not posting this on Monday, but I couldn’t get onto the internet Monday. This week’s problem is a doozy.

How many times can you take 5 away from 25. I will give you a hint, the answer is not 5.

The answer to last week’s problem was 12 hours.

2 notes today. 1st, today is Patriot Day in the U.S. in memory what happened 7 years ago early morning in New York, with the bombings of the World Trade Center buildings, an attack on the Pentagon (hey, look, something math-based!), and an attempted attack on the White House, thwarted by the passengers of Flight 93. Please remember the people who lost their lives in these tragic accidents and the families of those who lost loved ones. Remember those fighting terrorism in Iraq. On a 2nd, happier note, The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) had its construction and some testing done on it today. As a huge advancement for science, I think it deserves a mention. Have a great rest of today, and keep working towards my problems.

This month’s Challenge will be very fun.

If a car can move 1/2 of the distance to its destination every hour, how long until it moves 1/4096 of the distance, if it moves 1/2 of the distance in hour one?

The answer to last month’s challenge was 66.7% Thank you, MathCounts.

Alrighty here, questions of the week are starting back up again, and should run until May. These are nice little problems that can keep the blood flowing to your brain. This week’s question will run until Sunday, and a new one will hopefully be issued on Monday, so here it is:

A manufacturing plant bags 24 oz. bags of cat food. Sometimes, a little bit more or less cat food gets in the bag. The company owning the plant will let bags go through, as long as they do not weigh .45 oz. more or less than the desired weight. Write an equation that will represent the highest and lowest weights that the bags could be to go through, then give the values.

The school year is starting up, and with it, new lessons, and new questions of the week. I will also be adding some MathCounts things to my website, as I am now a co-advisor for my school system’s MathCounts program. Come here every week for the new problem, as well as to post your own questions on the help pages. Thank you for your continued support. I will (hopefully) post the Q of the Week on the 1st of September, as well as a new Monthly Challenge, and the answer to the last one.

First, I will do all of the credits. I would like to thank…

The teams at Wordpress and Edublogs -  for whom, this blog operates with. Wordpress helps with managing this little blog, and Edublogs hosts this blog, as well as provides tips on how to improve it. (Thank you, Ms. Waters and Mr. Farmer, you know who you are, for your help in unknowingly getting all of the Edublogs community’s blogs started and helping us with improving them

An anonymous math teacher, you know who you are as well, just read my blog’s subtitle, for introducing me to Edublogs and the wonderful world of blogging

All of you reading this, for keeping me going on this. If you know someone who is involved with math, whether as a student, or teacher, or in another profession, please share my blog with them. I would greatly appreciate it, as the more people that know about it, the more I feel like I’m not just doing this for those that I know.

The people that get me access to the internet, including those who have the computers I use, those who made them, the people who keep the internet connections going, those who installed the internet on the computers, the inventors of the internet, the inventors of the modern computer, and the other people who came up with stuff that help me type this, like the inventors of the alphabet.

I do use a few things with this that let me know where you readers are. I use clustrmaps (look on the right-hand side of the blog for the map), Google Analytics, which lets me know a little bit of how you guys use my website, RSS and Feedburner, which can let you get this in a reader, like My Yahoo or others, available off of the links in the right-hand side column. I also go to MathCounts for fun math-based things.

I hope this helps you understand a little bit about what all I do with my blog.

I’m sorry I am so late on posting this, but when it is summer time, you kind of lose track of stuff you do during the school year. I will keep on doing the monthly challenge, and I will restart the Question of the Week in  about 5 weeks, so keep holding on to my old questions. This monthly challenge is from MathCounts, a great program that encourages math in middle schools across the United States. Here is a link to the MathCounts website. Any way, here is this month’s Challenge…

On July 10th, 2008 Tai Shan (a young panda at Smithsonian’s National Zoo) turned 3 years old. Happy Birthday Tai Shan!

 

Tai Shan’s mom is Mei Xiang and his dad is Tian Tian. What percent of the distinct letters in Tia Shan’s name are found in his mom’s name and/or his dad’s name? Express your answer to the nearest tenth.

The answer to last month’s challenge, truncated in exponential form, is 1.2676506×10 to the 30th power

This is going to be an extension off of the weekly questions, and this will go on all year long. I will post a difficult question, you have 1 month to solve it. These questions are meant to make you think, so the first Monthly Challenge is…

What is 2 to the 100th power?