Natural Blogarithms

“Canadians eat enough Smarties each year to circle the Earth 350 times.”

So says the company Nestlé. They have also claimed that Canadians eat about 4 billion Smarties each year.

Now, if both those statements are true then, we have a problem. Considering that Earth is 24,901.55 miles about the equator, then for these statements to both be true, a smartie would have to be 11.5 feet in diameter. In case you are curious, Nestlé Smarties are a colourful sugar-coated chocolate confectionery popular in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, South Africa and the United Kingdom. They are similar to M&M’s produced by Mars.

As a matter of fact, a 6th grade class was able to get Nestle to change their tune on that bit of fun trivia:

Then they took the size of a single Smartie and worked out how many it would take to form a 40,000-kilometre necklace around the planet.

That’s when they figured out that something was wrong.

Four billion Smarties would go around the world just once.

“We broke it down from centimetres to metres and then kilometres,” student Caitlin Henderson says. For the candies to make 350 laps of the planet its circumference would need to be much smaller, or each Smartie would have to be bigger.

“Three and a half metres,” says student Kaylie Rankin. “It’s about the size of our chalkboard. I don’t know if I’d be able to eat it.”

Teacher Tanja Coghill says it took three letters to get Nestlé officials to admit their mistake, but it was important for the students to get that acknowledgement.

“We can make a difference,” she says. “We’re a little class of 10 students in Grade 6 in Thunder Bay, Ont., and you can make a difference with a huge multinational company.”

HT: think again

Trackback URI | Comments RSS