Do you know how to split the atom?

The April 3, 1994 issue of the Washington Post recounted how a sports celebrity failed to answer the following questions on a high school equivalency test:

1. If the equation for a circle is x2 + y2 = 34, what is the radius of the circle?

2. If 6 − 50 = x + 20, what is x?

3. If 2x plus 3x plus 5x = 180, what is x?

Bert Sugar, the publisher of Boxing Illustrated, was not surprised at the failure. He opined that anyone who could answer the math questions “could probably qualify as a nuclear scientist.” The reporter's reaction to this view was not recorded.

Contributed by Milt Eisner of Mount Vernon College in Washington, DC.

The number of tickets

The following problem is from page 52 of the first edition of Intermediate algebra by K. Elayn Martin-Gay (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993); the solution is provided by a student.

Problem. Eight hundred tickets for a play were sold for $2000. If the adult tickets cost $4 each and student tickets cost $2 each, find how many of each kind of ticket was sold.

Solution. Let x tickets be sold. Then 4x + 2x + 800 = 2000. So 6x = 1200 or x = 200. ♡.

In fact, there were 200 adult tickets sold.

Contributed by Robert W. Vallin of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.