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Showing posts from October 19, 2008

Elephants and A Boeing 747

In a recent pub quiz (in which I had the dubious role of being question master) one of the trivia type questions was this – A Boeing 747 weighs approximately the same as how many African elephants ? 25, 55, 125, or 225 ? Yes, I know – a rather silly question that not many people need to know the answer to, except perhaps someone who has the task of transporting a couple of African Elephants on a Boeing 747 – but this was a pub quiz remember. Anyway, great consternation went around the room together with a discussion on what one elephant might possibly weigh (Ok, there was also discussion on whether the question master had gone totally doollally, but that’s a different blog topic) Some people said they had no idea and couldn’t even give a wild guess. Others started talking about what could they relate the weight to - how many “average” men/women would be the same weight as one average elephant? Could we translate this into how many people would be the same weight as a plane and work it