OT: Engineers Quiz answers

OK, I will freely admit not everyone will agree with these. What the hell,
it's my quiz. :)

Engineers Quiz:
1: Which of the naturally occurring chemical elements has the distinction of
being both the cheapest and most expensive?

Carbon, as most people realised. Coal and diamond..

2: What is the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere?

Water vapor is correct, averaging about 2%. Argon is about 1%, CO2 about
0.045%

3: Genetically speaking, which did come first, the chicken or the egg?

The mutation that led to the first chicken must have been in the sperm or
ovum of a proto-chicken. This then laid the egg from which the first chicken
hatched. So, the egg came first.

4: How many odd numbered leap years have there been?

Seven, from 45 BC. They overran the calendar, so 4AD was NOT a leap year,
BTW.

5: Before Pluto was discovered, which planet was furthest from the Sun?

I should have removed this one, since poor Pluto has very unfairly been
demoted to 'minor planet'. So I guess the official answer is Neptune, since
Pluto is not a planet. My original answer was Pluto.

6: Without adding anything to either the ice cube or the water, how can you
make a pure water ice cube sink in a glass of water? (there are at least two
correct answers to this).

Heavy water ice. D2O (heavy water) freezes at 4deg C. and is about 6% denser
than water. I demonstrated this trick in a monthly gifted kids chemistry
show I used to do. It was the only one I ever came up with that stumped ALL
of them.
I got the water from the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance facility where I was a
student. They were throwing it out because - it was too wet. D2O absorbs
water from the atmosphere, and if it gets too much light water in it it is
useless for hydrogen-NMR work, as the water signal overwhelms everthing
else.

Dropping the glass into a bucket of petrol works too - the ice cube sinks,
in the glass of water, to the bottom of the bucket.

Also, IIRC, there are a couple of forms of ice that are denser than water at
super-high pressure. Don't know if they co-exist with liquid water, though.

7: If you hang a weight from a rubber band, then heat the band, does the
weight rise or lower?

The weight rises. Rubber is a polymer. Stretching it forces the polymer
molecules into a longer, more ordered arrangement, decreasing entropy.
Adding heat allows the molecules to jiggle about more, making it harder to
keep them stretched out, so a warm band stretches less than a cold one, for
the same weight.

8: If a butcher is 190 cm tall, blond, and male, what does he weigh?

Meat. OK, obvious. Setup for the format of q 12 though.

9: What is worth more, a box full of $1 coins or the same box half full of
$2 coins?

Oops, region-specific. $2 coins are smaller in Oz, so the answer is $2.
Someone pointed out that in the US, the $2 would be counterfeit.

10: How many people do you need to have in the same room to have a 50%
chance that at least two them share a birthday?

23. Google the math, if you want.

11: Starting at zero and spelling out the numbers, how far do you have to
count before you use the letter 'a'?

If you don't care which direction you count, it goes zero, negAtive one....

12: A pet shop owner has six canaries in a cage. Three are on the top perch,
one in the middle and two on the bottom. How many of the birds are for sale?

Ahem. The two at the bottom are for sale, as the rest are on higher
perches...

And finally, now that you all hate me:

13: What is the least toxic chronic poison known?

Heavy water. You need to replace about 30-40% of the water content of a
human with heavy water to kill them. The heavier hydrogen (deuterium) reacts
at a different (but not consistently different) rate from normal hydrogen,
which screws up metabolism. That makes the lethal amount that has to
accumulate about 15-20kg for a normal adult of 70-80 kg.

It would be a very expensive way to murder someone, though.

Cheers, Robbie.



.

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