General chemistry

Question

Suppose on average 2 penguins have 750000 feathers between them, 1 pillow requires 1283 feathers, 3 hippies need 16 pillows total to sleep, a treehouse can fit 8 hippies, and you need 322 planks of wood to build a treehouse. However, the hippies require that the wood for the treehouses be from recycled bongos, which will give you 5 planks of wood each. If you have 11 penguins, how many bongos do you need?

Answer 1

Nessa,

A great training problem for chemistry, in which you must make conversions among moles, grams, L, Daltons, and so on!

In your problem, you need to convert 11 penguins successively into the following units: feathers, pillows, hippies, treehouses, planks, and bongos. So for the first step, 11 penguins*750000feathers/2 penguins = 4125000 feathers (if I did that right mentally), and so on, until bongos is the result.

[ I should probably clue you in that "feathers" can be quite a loaded term, see for example: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-emperor-penguin-feathers-20151020-story.html

-- However, even counting the Emporer penguin's contour feathers (with their filoplumes), afterfeathers, and plumules, the latest estimate is 180,000/penguin. Well below 750,000. ]