Question

A billionaire offers to give you $5 billion if you will count out the amount in $1 bills or a lump sum of $5000. how long would it take you to count this many bills? assume that you can count at an average rate of one bill per second, and be sure to allow for the fact that you need about 10 h a day for sleeping and eating.

Answer 1

There is 24 hours in a day and you need to rest for 10 hours a day, so working hours = 14 hours

There is 60 minutes in one hour so if you count one dollar per sec,

14 hours/day x 60 min/hr x 60sec/min x $1 / sec = $50,400

So you can count $50,400/day and when there is $5 billion which is equal to = $5,000,000,000

And there is 365 days in a year so,

$5,000,000,000 / ($50,400/day) = 99206.35 / 365 = 271.8 years

Answer 2

You need to divide $5 billion by the lump sum of @5,000 (the one you will be counting). You can get 1,000,000. Since you can count one bill per second, you will need 1,000,000 seconds to count the $5 billion. In one day, you can only spend 14 hours of counting since you need to sleep for 10 hours per day. Converting 14 hours to seconds, you can get 50,400 seconds. Therefore, you can only count for 50,400 seconds per day. You need to divide the total time needed to count the money and your rate per day (1,000,000 seconds / 50,400 seconds). Solving it, you can get 19.84. It would take you approximately 19.84 days to count the $5 billion dollar using the lump sum $5,000-dollar bills.