A friend sent me a widely distributed forward yesterday—“Your Age in Chocolate.†I put in “9†for how often I want chocolate per week, and my age came out on target. Any math whizzes out there want to explain this? I’ve heard from several people that this forward is making the rounds through inboxes, but in case you haven’t seen it, here’s how it goes.
It takes less than a minute. Work this out as you read … Be sure you don’t read the bottom until you’ve worked it out!
- First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to have chocolate (more than once but less than 10)
- Multiply this number by 2 (just to be bold)
- Add 5
- Multiply it by 50
- If you have already had your birthday this year add 1756 …
If you haven’t, add 1755. - Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.
You should have a three digit number
The first digit of this was your original number (i.e., how many times you want to have chocolate each week).
The next two numbers are your age! THIS IS THE ONLY YEAR (2006) IT WILL EVER WORK, SO SPREAD IT AROUND WHILE IT LASTS.
Thats crazy, it works!
Oh, it’s not really all that crazy. Don’t let yourself get confused by all the adding and subtracting. Your age comes our right because you tell it what your age is– it’s really that simple. If I told you what year I was born and if I’ve had my birthday yet this year, you wouldn’t need a PHd in math to tell me how old I was.
Let’s simplify it further. Nobody would be amazed at this:
1. Think of how many times a day you go to the bathroom.
2. Multiply that by 100.
Voila! The new number has the number of times a day you go to the bathroom in the hundreds place!
Well, of course it does, because you told it how many times a day you went to the bathroom, then you multiplied it by 100, what else would you expect?
This candy age thing is almost identical, but instead of telling you to multiply it by 100 they tell you to multiply it by 2 and then later to multiply it by 50, which is of course the same as multiplying something by 100.
Bored yet?
Okay, we’ll go through it.
1. First of all, pick the number of times a week that you would like to have chocolate (more than once but less than 10)
– We’ll call this number x.
2. Multiply this number by 2 (just to be bold)
– 2x
3. Add 5
– 2x + 5
4. Multiply it by 50
50 (2x + 5) = 100x + 250
5. If you have already had your birthday this year add 1756 …
If you haven’t, add 1755.
6. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.
These last two steps have you adding a number, that when added to the 250 already in the equation, will equal 2005 or 2006 depending on if you’ve had your birthday yet this year or not. So essentially they give you an equation that has you adding numbers up to something that equals the current year and then they tell you to subtract the year you were born from that. This is exactly how you find out how old someone is when they don’t tell you their age but let slip the year they were born; you’d subtract it from the current year.
They tell you that “this is the only year it will work,†and that’s true enough, as far as it goes. But that’s only because next year will be 2007 so you need to add different numbers (this years numbers plus one) in step 5 to get to 2007 so when you subtract the year the person was born you’ll get the right answer.
oh, ok, so you are 26, too? Somehow I envisioned this old guy sitting there trying all this candy…how silly of me…
RESPONSE: Victoria (the writer that wrote this) is 26. Brian, the owner/editor of the site is the old guy sitting there trying all this candy – I am in my 30s :)
–Brian
Yay! It worked! And quit trying to take the fun out of it, ACC! ;-p
That’s crazy. Maybe it’s really not, but it sure was a fun.
Candy=fun. Damn anyone who tries to take that away from me. That is all.
Thanks ACC! It’s so simple when broken down – and it was on a Stats exam too :)
This also works in 2010 except different calculations