A Math Exam, but Obviously Some Stuff Has Happened over the Summer in the Teacher’s Personal Life

1. Two trains are heading toward each other. Jane’s train left the station in Atlanta at 5 a.m., traveling north at 60 miles per hour. 1,124 miles away, Tom’s train left the station in St. Paul at 5:30 a.m., traveling south at 70 miles per hour. At what time will Jane’s train collide with Tom’s, and how much sooner would the collision have happened had our country invested in high-speed rail like most other industrialized nations?

2. Would bureaucratic interventions and government regulations have been able to prevent this disaster? If yes, would you reconsider your answer, knowing that those regulations could negatively impact shareholder dividends by up to 4 percent over the course of a fiscal year?

3. Calculate how likely you’d be to watch a video of the train crash if it popped up in your social media feed. It’s a tragedy, but it would probably be crazy to see, right? While you’re on Instagram there, do you follow my wife, Evelyn? Can you look her up and see if she’s posting stuff on her stories with a guy named Mark? I don’t want her to see that I’m looking at her stories. We’re doing a trial separation thing. It’s no big deal.

4. The news of the train crash is being broadcast at a pizza parlor where a handsome-ish math teacher is seated. Mark, Evelyn, and eight of their friends are at a table. They order three pizzas, and each pizza has eight slices. If everyone at the table eats two slices, how many slices are left? If it’s more than zero, then it shouldn’t be a big deal if the math teacher comes over, sits down, and grabs a slice, right? So explain why the math teacher is getting yelled at by Mark to “get out of here, freak” and “move on, Bozo—it’s not a trial separation, the divorce is final, and Evelyn is with me now.”

5. If each train weighed exactly 4,000 tons, calculate the force (m a) of the collision. What is the percentage chance that Jane, the beautiful woman who was aboard the first train and who, two years ago, was twice her sixteen-year-old sister’s age, survives the crash but her fiancé, Greg, does not? Do you think a traumatic loss like that would make a beautiful woman like Jane lower her standards to the point where she’d consider going out with a recently divorced, thirty-eight-year-old math teacher with thinning hair but several patterned blazers? What if he (sort of) has a car?

6. A court found the train company to have been negligent in its safety practices and, as a result, it must pay out $2 million to Jane. Out of love, Jane deposits that money into the savings account of the math teacher she’s recently started seeing. After the deposit, his account has a balance of $1,997,320. If the account collects interest at 3 percent compounded annually, how much will be in the account after four years?

7. Mark is six inches taller than Evelyn, who is two inches shorter than the math teacher. How many inches would the math teacher need to grow for him to be taller than Mark? If, according to the website, an experimental procedure can be done by Turkish doctors to add height to a person, but each inch costs $450,000, how long would it take for the account where Jane deposited her settlement check to accumulate enough money to cover the cost of making the math teacher at least one inch taller than Mark?

8. Do you think if Evelyn saw on Instagram that the math teacher was now taller than Mark and hand-in-hand with a beautiful woman like Jane, it would make Evelyn jealous and cause her to leave Mark, a guy who yells at innocent, hungry divorcés in pizzerias, and return to the blazer-clad math teacher she once had?

Show your work.