Sandy Wood
Brain Game: Time to Kill
by Sandy Wood - June 16, 2009 - 7:30 AM

bloghead_braingames.jpg

Seconds make minutes, minutes make hours, hours make days. You can probably take it from there. But before you do, please try today’s Brain Game. Good luck:

Calculators down… try to guesstimate this one.

Which is larger: (A) The number of minutes in a month
or (B) the number of days in a century?

Here is the ANSWER.
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Comments (11)

  1. A.
    I actually got this one! No calculators I swear!

    captcha: Forfeit July- Guess I better get away next month

    posted by twodollars on 6-16-2009 at 7:46 am

  2. I got this one too! Yay! Just out of curiosity, how many days per month are you using?

    posted by Lily on 6-16-2009 at 8:10 am

  3. i got this one, too.
    365×100=36,500 days in a century
    60×25=1500
    1500×30=approximately 45,000 minutes in a month

    posted by Jen on 6-16-2009 at 8:14 am

  4. You know, some months are 28 days long while some are 31. The question should have been a 30 day month or at least specified how long the month was.

    posted by IP on 6-16-2009 at 8:37 am

  5. IP, doing so would have made the total of minutes in a month a bit higher or lower, but it would not have affected the correct answer one bit.

    posted by Sandy Wood on 6-16-2009 at 8:52 am

  6. My deep knowledge of the Rent soundtrack allowed me to answer this one. 525 600 minutes in a year, so I roughly divided that by 12-ish. And of course, days in a century is easy.

    posted by Jacquilynne on 6-16-2009 at 11:36 am

  7. I think guesstimating is too much to ask, considing how close they are.
    I figured it out by counting 1200 months in a century versus 1440 minutes in a day.
    At this point, I can’t tell you why this works (in part because my mind has moved on), but it is a pretty good approximation.

    posted by anomdebus on 6-16-2009 at 1:02 pm

  8. Oh, right, the thing that goes into the other thing is smaller relative to the other things.. Of course!

    posted by anomdebus on 6-16-2009 at 1:20 pm

  9. What’s an average century? Won’t there always be 25 leap years?

    posted by Ryan on 6-17-2009 at 12:51 am

  10. Ryan, good question – but actually, no. Leap years don’t occur on century-ending years that aren’t evenly divisible by 400. So 1700 was not a leap year. Neither was 1800 or 1900. The year 2000 WAS a leap year (2000 is evenly divisible by 400), but 2100 won’t be.

    So an “average” century has 24.25 leap days… that’s why we added that extra text in. I knew someone would mention it if I didn’t!

    posted by Sandy Wood on 6-17-2009 at 1:39 am

  11. Lily, I calculated the number of days in a month as 365/12 in order to get a good “average” number.

    posted by Sandy Wood on 6-17-2009 at 1:54 am

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