Math for Dummies

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_5/Moody.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

1. Calculating your way to good health

A bag of ridge-cut, salt & pepper potato chips contains 16 servings. One serving contains 4% of your body’s daily iron needs. If you eat 25 servings (approximately = to 1 & 1/2 bags + 7 medium-sized chips), you will have consumed your RDA of iron.

2. How to obtain a free television

Let’s say you’ve had your eye on a certain pair of shoes in the department store. The shoes cost $100. One day you decide to treat yourself to the shoes, but when you go to the store to purchase them, you find they’ve gone on sale for half price. As you had already decided to purchase the shoes before you even entered the store, you had effectively already spent the $100. Instead you pay $50. The fifty dollars that remain is free money. If you can make the commitment to purchase everything you have been contemplating, you will soon have saved enough money for a free television.

3. Supersizing The Last Supper

As rendered in paintings from the past 1,000 years, the size of the main course of that famous meal has increased 69% when viewed in proportion to the size of the human head in the same paintings. If the median weight of Jesus and each of the disciples is 162 pounds, then the total poundage of those holy men today would approximately equal the weight of one Honda Element, gas tank on empty.

X. Now try one yourself for extra credit points:

A killer whale weighing x pounds is performing tricks in a tank which contains one blonde, wet-suited trainer and y gallons of artificially-churned, chemically-managed sea water. If the whale earns z fish for each activity he performs correctly, how many mindless circuits must the whale make around the tank before it yanks the trainer by the ponytail and hauls her into the water, holding her beneath the surface until the bubbles stop?