A boy collects white seashells from the sea and brings them home every night. When he has enough of them, he decides to sell them to a trader.
The trader is ready to buy the shells and he asks the boy about the quantity. At this, the boy starts calculating. He has a giant box that contains 3 mini boxes. Two of them have another mini box inside. If the giant box can hold 50 shells, how many brown shells can he sell to the trader?
Assume there are approximately 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) people on Earth. What would you estimate to be the result, if you multiply together the number of fingers on every person's left hand? (For the purposes of this exercise, thumbs count as fingers, for five fingers per hand.) If you cannot estimate the number then try to guess how long the number would be.
A woman lives in a skyscraper thirty-six floors high and is served by several elevators which stop at each floor going up and down. Each morning she leaves her apartment and goes to one of the elevators. Whichever one she takes is three times more likely to be going up than down. Why?
