Getting Carried Away - By Ants - Bedtime Math

Skip to contentGetting Carried Away – by Ants

Ants are famous for being strong: a leafcutter ant can carry 50 times its own weight. So how many ants would it take to pick YOU up and carry you? An ant weighs only 1/200th of a gram, so it can carry only about 1/4 gram. A gram is 1/28th of an ounce, and an ounce is 1/16th of a pound…so it would take several hundred ants to pick up each pound of you. Luckily, there are about 1 quintillion, or 1 million TRILLION ants on Earth to help out!

Wee ones: Who has more legs, you or one of those 6-legged ants?

Little kids: If 4 ants can pick up a 1-gram paper clip, how many ants does it take to pick up 2?  Bonus: Which needs more ants to pick it up, a 16-oz bag of chips or a 24-ounce bag of cookies?

Big kids: If you carried a truck that weighed 50 times your weight, how heavy would that be? (You can round off your weight to the nearest multiple of 10 if you like.)  Bonus: If we round off that it takes 500 ants to carry 1 pound, how many ants does it take to carry you?

Answers: Wee ones: The ant has more legs.

Little kids: 8 ants.  Bonus: The bag of cookies.

Big kids: Different for everyone…multiply your weight in pounds by 50.  Bonus: Again, different for everyone…multiply your weight by 500, which is the same as your previous answer here times 10. Now try imagining that many ants!

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