~CONTENT POWERED BY FLOOD MARKETING~
Remember back when you were in fourth grade all scrunched up in your awkwardly-small desk staring dazedly out the window, hoping beyond hope that your mom had packed you a PBJ-with-the-crusts-cut-off in your Hulk Hogan lunchbox because it was only five more minutes to the bell and recess and lunch and what you believed was the sandwich of your dreams?
But then reality smacked you upside your daydreaming head and you realized that your math test had to be completed before you could go outside to resume that epic tetherball match you’d been engaged in at first recess so you looked down at the collated-and-stapled mathematical monstrosity devouring your desk and noticed that you still had one problem left, and it was a word problem?
A word problem! Talk about cruel-and-unusual punishment. Those things were the Rubik’s Cube of math problems, except that you couldn’t simply peel off the stickers, haphazardly stick them back on and have the solution. You actually had to think to solve those suckers, and yet you only had five minutes until recess and tethered glory and that desperately-hoped-for sandwich.
So you hunkered down, focused and started to read through the problem, to truly analyze it, to break it down to its component parts from the inside-out, and it was then — and only then — that it fully hit you that there was absolutely no chance you were getting your test done in the next five minutes, which was actually now three minutes due to all of that strenuous hunkering and focusing and such.
And why did you have no chance? Because that word problem — the scourge of adolescent academia — was probably something like this (check out the cool time-lapse first; it might help):
It’s a gorgeous October day in Sheridan, Wyoming, and Kyle Eisele and his crew from GFK Construction are pouring concrete at Black Tooth Brewing Company. A lot of concrete. Around 55 yards to be exact, which is only a fraction of the 300 total yards of concrete set to be poured as part of the local brewery’s expansion project.
Keeping in mind that one cubic yard of poured concrete weighs approximately 4000 pounds AND that a full-grown male African elephant can weigh up to 7,000 kilograms AND that there was enough linear feet of rebar placed in the pour area to recreate the hull of the Titanic AND that the IBU measurement for a pint of Black Tooth Indian Paintbrush IPA is 65 AND that a Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway train leaves Sheridan traveling at 42 MPH, what’s the European shoe size of Black Tooth Head Brewmaster Travis Zeilstra?
Sayonara, recess and tetherball and sandwich, right? (Although your mom packed you a cruddy bologna one anyway, so no biggie there.)
And thanks a lot, math. For nothing.
(PS – The answer is purple.)
