Thursday 26 May 2016

Quibans 31: Olympic preparations

from the BBC News website:

Rio 2016: Key facts ahead of the Olympics

From 5 August Rio will welcome 206 countries to four venues to compete for 4,924 medals across 42 sports... all in just 17 days of action.

A fleet of 21 jumbo jets would be required to fly all 10,500 athletes out to Rio.

Also in attendance will be 315 horses - more than enough horses to fill a Grand National field seven times over.

About 140,000 people are needed to host the Games in August. Of those, 90,000 will be employees with a further 50,000 volunteers.


Rio hotel room prices have jumped from an average of £67 to £196 a night, with only 14% of official hotel rooms left available.

The most tweeted moments of London 2012:

There will be 32 tonnes of dead fish removed from the rowing and canoeing lagoon before the water-based activities take place.  That's the equivalent of 70,548lbs of Brazilian fish stew, enough to feed 47,032 locals their favourite Moqueca dish.

In total, about 7.5 million tickets for the Rio Games will be on sale. By the end of April, 60% had been sold.

Questions:
  1. How many seats are there on a jumbo jet?
  2. How many horses run in the Grand National?
  3. How does the number of media people compare to the number of volunteers?
  4. How many media people does each country send on average?
  5. Why is this not at likely to be the number sent by each country?
  6. What is the percentage price rise of a hotel room?
  7. Usain Bolt ran in the winning 4x100m relay team.  If you combine the tweets involving Bolt, how does this compare to the basketball final?
  8. Why might there have been more tweets about Andy Murray than about the USA basketball team?
  9. 1 ton = 2000 lbs.  1 tonne = 0.98 ton.  What percentage of the weight of fish stew is fish?
  10. How much fish stew does a Brazilian eat in one go?
  11. How many tickets were left at the start of May?
  12. I know that there are gold, silver, bronze medals for each event.  Why is it a surprise to read that there are 4,924 medals?
  13. What is wrong with the numbers about the fish stew?

Answers:
  1. The story claims there are 524 seats on a standard 747.  Using the figures in the article you might assume there are 500 seats.  At 524 seats per plane, on 20 planes you would get 10,480 - leaving just 20 athletes in the final plane!
  2. 315/7 = 45.  You could nearly stage 8 races, because there are actually 40 horses in the race.
  3. Just over half as many.
  4. It looks as if there are about 25,000 media representatives.  Divide this by 206 countries and you get 121.  (Better probably to do 25000/200 to give about 125.)
  5. Presumably small countries won't send as many people.  I assume that many of the events will be filmed by only the official Olympic broadcaster and the footage shared among everyone.
  6. £196/£67 = 2.93, which is 293% of the previous cost.  There has therefore been a 193% rise.
  7. 40,000 + 50,000 + 75,000 = 165,000 (figures are approximate), compared to 80,000.  This is just over twice as much.  
  8. The previous Olympics were in London, so people might have tweeted more about Murray's other matches.  It also says that the graph shows the number of tweets per minute.  We don't know which event prompted the most tweets overall.
  9. 32 tonnes = 31.36 tons = 62720 lbs.  62720 lbs / 70,548lbs = 0.889  This means each pound of stew requires 0.89 pounds of fish (but presumably some parts are thrown away (bones?). 
  10. 70,548lbs / 47,032 = 1.5
  11. 40% of 7.5 million is 3 million.
  12. 4,924 is not divisible by 3.  Some events (such as boxing) have 1 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals.
  13. They are over-accurate.  The figure for the amount of fish is given as 32 tonnes - this will be an estimate and has clearly been rounded.  The number of people the fish stew would feed has been given to 5 significant figures!

Source:

Monday 2 May 2016

Quibans 30: Footballers' salaries

This could be a brief task, or a longer one.  Beware - there are answers throughout the post.  Teachers might want to extract the images to display rather than projecting from the web.

The initial article comes from the Daily Telegraph:

Chelsea transfer news: 18-year-old Dominic Solanke demands £50,000 per week

Chelsea's inability to bring through a home-grown player since John Terry has left them in a difficult position over the future of teenage striker Dominic Solanke, whose list of demands is understood to include first-team guarantees and a contract worth over £50,000-a-week.

Solanke is one of the most highly-rated young forwards in the country, but the 18-year-old’s Chelsea contract is due to expire in 12 months and talks over a new deal have hit an impasse.

Solanke has made one senior appearance for Chelsea, in the Champions League. The club value him as a highly promising player with the potential to break through, which was reflected in a first professional contract worth £7,000-a-week that was signed in September 2014.

To put Solanke’s alleged demands into perspective, Harry Kane currently earns around £50,000-a-week at Tottenham Hotspur and was collecting £20,000-a-week as recently as January 2015.


Questions:
  1. What is Solanke’s annual salary at the moment?
  2. What does he want it to be?
  3. What percentage pay rise would that be?
  4. What percentage pay rise did Kane receive? 
Answers:

  1. £7,000 x 52 = £364,000
  2. £50,000 x 52 = £ 2.6 million
  3. Rise is (50 – 7) thousand = 43,000. 43/7 x 100% = 614% 
  4. 30/20 is a pay rise of 150%
This can be extended further by using the brilliant website http://www.whatfootballersearn.com

Here is a comparison between arguably the two best players in the world:

What questions could we ask/answer here? Here are some examples:

  • What is their salary per year?
  • How much tax do they pay? (Will need to look up Spanish tax rates)
  • What is the percentage by which Messi out-earns Ronaldo?
  • How much do they each earn per second?
And here are the answers given by the website:

Messi out-earns Ronaldo by (336 – 274) / 274 = 23%

Martin Odegaard was signed by Real Madrid as a 16-year-old. Here is his salary compared with Wayne Rooney’s:

To save us lots of calculator work, it would make sense to create a spreadsheet (optional). It might look something like this, so we could type the weekly salary into a yellow cell:
Now we need to consider rounding issues.

Can we extend it so we can work out how long it will take each of them to afford particular things (such as an iPhone, or a new car)?

Also on the website is a comparison page. The UK average salary is £26,500 per year, so I have typed that in:

I left the website up for about 2 minutes before I took the image. Can you work out the values?

Here is the answer:

Can you work out exactly how long the page was up before I took the image?

(Answer: 124.6 seconds)

I let the page run for a while. When it said this how much had someone on the average wage earned?


Answer:


Final thought: the values given here are the footballers’ basic salaries, as paid by their clubs. They get extra for endorsing and advertising other products too. It is an irony that if I want a pair of top-of-the-range football boots then I need to pay several hundred pounds for them, whereas Rooney et al are not only given boots but are paid to wear them!

Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/04/25/chelseas-dominic-solanke-demands-50000-per-week/
http://www.whatfootballersearn.com/compare/cristiano-ronaldo/vs/lionel-messi/
http://www.whatfootballersearn.com/matcher/?salary=26500&match=false&player_id=852

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