If you have not yet answered all the questions yourself, please go back here and do so. Here are the answers, from an almanac or similar source.
January 1, 2000, population of the United States is
272.5 million.
Napoleon was born in 1769.
The Mississippi-Missouri river is 3,710 miles long.
Maximum takeoff weight of a B747-400 airliner
is 875,000 pounds.
A radio signal travels from the earth to the moon
in 1.29 seconds.
Latitude of London is about 51.5 degrees.
A space shuttle orbits the earth in about 91 minutes.
4200 feet between the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.
56 signers of the
Declaration of Independence.
206 bones in the adult human body.
Please count how many of your ranges included the correct answer. Because you used a 90-percent confidence interval, you should have gotten about nine of the ten answers correct.
If you had all ten answers correct, then you may be an excellent estimator. Then again, your ranges may be way too big. You can probably guess which.
If you had six or fewer answers correct, then you are probably as embarrassed as I was when I first took a similar estimation quiz. A little practice couldn't hurt your estimation skills.
If you had seven or eight answers correct, then you are a pretty good guesser. In the future, remember to broaden your 90-percent ranges just a bit.
If you had exactly nine answers correct, then you may be an excellent guesser. Or, you may have given infinite ranges for the first nine questions, and zero for the last question. If so, shame on you.
Copyright © 1999 Lucent Technologies. All rights reserved. Mon 9 Aug 1999