The world's population is over 6 billion people. A estimate of 1/6 of them celebrate Christmas. Santa works from midnight until 6:00am. How much time does Santa have to visit each house? How many houses must he visit each second? Allow for 4 people per household and 24 time zones.
By going from east to west, Santa gets to cross time zone boundaries and set his watch back one hour 24 times. Therefore he has 24+6 = 30 hours of real elapsed time to accomplish his mission. To visit 1 billion Christmas-observing people in 30 hours, thatr means 10^9/(30*60*60) = 9260 people (2315 houses) per second.
To determine how much time Santa has to visit each house, we need to calculate the total number of houses he needs to visit and divide it by the amount of time he has.
First, let's calculate the number of houses Santa needs to visit.
The world's population is estimated to be over 6 billion people. If 1/6 of them celebrate Christmas, we need to find 1/6 of 6 billion.
1/6 * 6,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000 houses
Now, let's determine the time Santa has to visit each house. Santa works from midnight until 6:00 am, which is 6 hours.
To calculate the time Santa has per house, we divide the total time by the number of houses:
6 hours / 1,000,000,000 houses = 0.000000006 hours per house
Since we typically measure time in seconds, let's convert hours to seconds:
0.000000006 hours * 3600 seconds per hour = 0.0000216 seconds per house
Now, let's calculate how many houses Santa must visit each second.
We know that there are 24 time zones, so Santa needs to visit houses in each time zone.
Since there are 24 time zones and 0.0000216 seconds per house, we multiply them:
24 time zones * 0.0000216 seconds per house = 0.0005184 houses per second
So, Santa must visit approximately 0.0005184 houses per second to cover every household, assuming there are 4 people per household and 24 time zones.