In the Super Bowl, a bunch of guys on a football field try to throw a pointy ball and knock each other down, while the rest of us watch and eat way too much pizza. So how many pizzas can fill a football field? Well, the field plus end zones is 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide. Four 18-inch square pizza boxes fit into each square yard, giving us 25,584 pizzas. And if we FILL the stadium, stacking 2-inch-thick boxes 128 feet high, we can fit almost 20 million pizzas!
Wee ones: What shape is the football field itself (the grassy part in the white lines)?
Little kids: If you lay out 4 pizza boxes to make a square yard, then eat 1 of those pizzas yourself, how many pizzas are left? Bonus: If pizza boxes are 2 inches thick, how many do you have to stack to reach 1 foot? (Hint if needed: A foot has 12 inches…try counting up by 2s!)
Big kids: How many 2-inch pizza boxes would stack to be as tall as you? Find your height in inches! Bonus: If each one is cut into 10 slices, how many slices does that give you?
The sky’s the limit: FedEx Field seats about 80,000 people. If you can fit 20 million pizzas in there, how many pizzas does each fan get to eat if they divide them up equally?
Answers:
Wee ones: A rectangle.
Little kids: 3 pizzas. Bonus: 6 pizza boxes.
Big kids: Different for everyone…find your height in inches to the nearest even number, then divide by 2. Bonus: Different for everyone again: multiply your number of boxes by 10, which is the same as tacking a zero on the end.
The sky’s the limit: 250 pizzas per person. A trick: to divide by 80,000 you’re dividing by 8, then by 10,000. And dividing by 8 is just the same as cutting in half, then in half again, then in half a third time.
