Back before I became a history major and a writer, I was mostly known academically as a math geek. In seventh and eighth grade, I was good enough to be in Mathcounts, a national math competition. (Actually, I was never good enough to make it to nationals; this kid from Paul Breaux Middle always beat me in the finals.)
Anyway, despite the fact I last competed in 1988, I somehow have remained on the Mathcounts mailing list for the last 14 years. In the latest edition of “Mathcounts News,” there are five sample questions from recent competitions. Since you folks seemed to like it the last time we played Math Quiz here on crabwalk.com, here are a few more. (I can only post the first three here now because the other two include graphs or charts. Leave your answers in the comments. And don’t look there before you do the problems yourself!)
1. What is the sum of the reciprocals of the natural-number factors of 6?
2. A middle school has 12 doors to enter or leave the building. In how many ways is it possible to enter the building by one door and leave by a different door?
3. At the Word Store, each vowel sells for a different price, but all consonants are free. The word “triangle” sells for $6, “square” sells for $9, “pentagon” sells for $7, “cube” sells for $7, and “tetrahedron” sells for $8. What is dollar cost of the word “octahedron”?
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Ha! I was in Mathcounts, too. We actually made it to state in eighth grade. And I competed on the math team, too, in Number Sense and Calculator. The high school UIL coach tried to recruit me for math, but I was too interested in that whole newspaper thing to indulge her.
Oh, and the answers are 2, 131, and $11. I think.
isn’t the 12 door one 132?
12 pick 2…12!/(12-2)!
=132
yeah, it’s 132. I… can’t do math, apparently. But I solved it 12 * (12-1).
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