MATH LESSON--
Two Billion Krispy Kreme Mentions
Yet another tool for teachers
Newspapers and magazines are crammed with simple tools you can use to teach math and science. Here is one of them.
Take a look at this article that appears in the October/November 2003 issue of a magazine called American Journalism Review. The article describes the massive amount of press coverage that's given to a chain of donut shops called Krispy Kreme.
It quotes someone named Amy Joyner, who is described as "a business reporter from Greensboro, North Carolina's News & Record, located just one town over from Krispy Kreme's corporate headquarters." Now look at these two sentences:
"Joyner is quite familiar with Krispy Kreme's brilliantly honed marketing. In 2002, she says, the company recorded a stunning 2 billion media mentions."
Two billion. That's 2,000,000,000. That's a lot of media mentions. Your students may wonder how it can possibly be. Maybe if they count every copy of every newspaper that mentioned Krispy Kreme, that would come to 2 billion. Maybe there are other possibilities.
Your students will enjoy figuring out this tasty, real-life mathematical problem. And maybe the Krispy Kreme company will enjoy receiving any letters your students may wish to send to them.
© Copyright 2003 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
This is a HotAIR feature. For a complete list of features,
see What's New.