Fortune and chance: time to see if you paid attention during your statistics class. One of the most famous mathematical problems concerning probability goes as follows:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
No worries, you won’t have to do the math. But what is this ‘Three Door Problem’ more commonly known as?
----- Monty Hall Problem – after the original game-show host
You must all know that there is only one moon orbiting our planet Earth. Our neighbour closer to the sun, Venus, actually has no moons in orbit. But how many moons does our other next door neighbour, Mars, have?
----- 2: Phobos and Deimos
Water exists in three main forms: gaseous, liquid and solid. When it goes from solid to liquid, we call that melting. When water moves from its liquid form to its gaseous form, that’s evaporation. Now, you probably see where this is going: what do you call the change from gas to solid form.
----- Sublimation
Since 2008 our associations with the stock market will probably be rather negative. Red numbers, plummeting graphs and chaos on the trading floor. In the industry, such a period is known as a bear market, and can quickly spiral into a full-on crisis. But of course the financial sector also has huge positive periods. Which farm animal represents these more optimistic days?
----- Bull (Market)
In an attempt to lower traffic accidents, the Brussels Government in 2021 decided to lower the speed limit for (almost) the entirety of its territory. We only need a number from you: how fast are you allowed to drive on the streets surrounding Flagey since then?
----- 30 km/h
Some people see life in a more negative light than others. There is however someone even more gloomy than your average person. Dubbed "the philosopher of pessimism" by his biographer Frederick Copleston, this great thinker wrote down his rather grim world view in his seminal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Which cheerful lad are we talking about?
----- (Arthur) Schopenhauer