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Test Your Smarts: How Many Golf Balls Can Fit In a School Bus? [UPDATED]

Google is known for asking incredibly difficult questions of its job seekers. This is one of them.

Amanda M. Fairbanks
By Amanda M. FairbanksNov 12, 2010
Amanda M. Fairbanks
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Google is known for asking incredibly difficult questions of its job seekers. Business Insider recently compiled a list of the 15 hardest questions (answers can be found here). Among them: Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew, why are manhole covers round, and how many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

One particularly vexing question: How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

How would you solve it?

A clever reader's response, which begins:

I figure a standard school bus is about 8ft wide by 6ft high by 20 feet long—this is just a guess based on the thousands of hours I have been trapped behind school buses while traffic in all directions is stopped.

That means 960 cubic feet and since there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubit foot, that means about 1.6 million cubic inches.

I calculate the volume of a golf ball to be about 2.5 cubic inches (4/3 * pi * .85) as

.85 inches is the radius of a golf ball.

The rest can be found here.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user basheertome

Via Alexander Russo at This Week in Education

educationinterviewgoogleschool busgolf ballsquizinterview questionshow many

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