New Years Math Fun Facts

 

Today, I decided to look at fun math facts associated with New Years because they can be used to help hook students when we get back to school for spring semester.  For most people, they stay up till midnight, enjoy a glass fo something to ring in the new year.  In addition, you might watch the various new year celebrations that are broadcast beginning on the east coast and follows across the country so you can celebrate more than once.

Have you ever wondered how many times the new year is celebrated around the globe?  When they set up time zones, they wanted to set it up as 24 different zones, each one hour apart but it didn't work out that way.  Instead, many of the countries are half an hour off of other countries, or a country has multiple time zones so it works out that there are 40 different countdowns to ring in the new year.  But what happens if you are on the International Space Station?  Since they are not associated with an earth based time zone, when do they celebrate the new year?

Since the International Space Station is moving all the time, they move fast enough to see sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes which mean they spend about 4 minutes in each time zone. This can make it difficult so they base their time and New Years celebration on Greenwich mean time because the Royal Observatory has been at the center of time keeping for centuries.

Did you know that 45 percent of Americans make resolutions such as loosing weight, giving up smoking, save more, etc but 25 percent of those give up on their resolutions by the second week of January.  So if the population of the United States in 2020 is said to be 329.5 million people, how many people made resolutions and how many quit within two weeks.  According to another fact, 80 percent of people give up on their resolutions by February. 

In addition, Americans open enough champagne to enjoy 360 million glasses of it at the New Years.  If we assume only adults drink the champagne, we know that 258.3 million people of the United States are adults so how many glasses are being drunk per person?  Furthermore, 41 percent of Americans state that New Years eve is their favorite holiday but 3 percent of the population never celebrates it at all.  In addition, 28 percent of people who drink, have food delivered on January first.

We all love watching the ball drop in New York city.  The one they televise every New Years at midnight and all one million people in Times Square celebrate it.  Times Square is said to take up 11,600 square feet  of area so the density of squeezing one million people into it is going to be huge.  Let your students calculate the density of number of people per square feet.  Since it works out to about 86.2 people per square foot, it can open up discussions on how can you get that number of people in such a small space.  This million people leave 56 tons of trash including 1.5 tons of confetti.  This opens up another great problem of figuring out how many pounds of trash are left by each person?

These facts offer teachers a chance to turn percents into actual numbers so students get a more realistic idea of how many are participating in each thing.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.