July 7 is Chocolate Day, the perfect day to celebrate eating it — because after all, chocolate is a vegetable! It’s made from cacao beans that are dried out, roasted, ground up, and mixed with sugar and sometimes milk. In 2007, Hershey celebrated its 100th birthday by making the world’s largest chocolate kiss, which weighed more than 30,000 pounds! Even if chocolate is a vegetable, that sounds like too much to eat.
Wee ones: If you eat a chocolate bar, then a chocolate kiss, then another bar, then another kiss, how many chocolate things did you eat?
Little kids: If you eat 2 kisses today, then 4 tomorrow, then 6 the next day, how many do you guess you eat the day after that? Bonus: Which bar has more squares: a bar with 2 rows of 4 squares, or a bar with 3 rows of 3 squares?
Big kids: If you eat 2 chocolate kisses, then a button, then 2 more kisses and a button to repeat, what’s the 20th thing you eat? Bonus: If the most chocolate anyone can eat without feeling sick is 4 ounces, how many people could snack on that 30,000-pound kiss? (Reminder if needed: A pound has 16 ounces…so how many people could eat each pound?)
The sky’s the limit: We all know that if you put out a mix of desserts — cookies, cupcakes, donuts — the chocolate ones run out faster. If you put 42 cupcakes on a platter, where there are twice as many chocolate cupcakes as vanilla and twice as many vanilla cupcakes as rainbow sprinkle, how many of each cupcake do you have?
Answers:
Wee ones: 4 chocolate things.
Little kids: 8 kisses. Bonus: The 3 x 3 bar, which has 9 squares compared to 8.
Big kids: A kiss, since it’s the 2nd item in that set of 3 (#19, 20, 21). Bonus: 120,000 people, since 4 people eat each pound.
The sky’s the limit: 6 rainbow, 12 vanilla, and 24 chocolate cupcakes. Each rainbow cupcake has 2 vanilla cupcakes with it and 4 chocolate ones (2 x 2), making a set of 7. So we just need to figure out how many sets of these 7 cupcakes we can fit in 42. There are 6 sets, so there are 6 rainbow cupcakes, and we keep doubling from there.
