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Best Guess · Puzzle #13 · Monday, October 12

Best Guess: the answers

Four questions, each with one true number. Here they are with their answers, how to reason each one out, and where the number comes from. Play today's Best Guess.

  1. 1. How many Christmas trees did US tree farms cut in 2022?

    The answer: more than 14.5 million. Christmas trees are grown commercially in all 50 states.

    Napkin math
    1. 130Mhouseholds in the US
    2. ÷5households for each real tree

    ≈26Mtrees

    Source: USDA Economic Research Service, 2022 Census of Agriculture: U.S. tree farms cut more than 14.5 million Christmas trees in 2022

  2. 2. How many pounds of vegetables (fresh, canned, frozen and all, potatoes and tomatoes included) were available per American in 2022?

    The answer: about 374 pounds. Potatoes and tomatoes make up a big share of it, much of that processed.

    Napkin math
    1. 365days a year
    2. ×1pound of vegetables a day

    ≈365pounds

    Source: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Availability (Per Capita) Data System: Vegetables (all uses), Total

  3. 3. If all the DNA in a single human cell were stretched out end to end, how many feet long would it be?

    The answer: about 6 feet. All of it is packed into a nucleus so small it can only be seen with a microscope.

    Napkin math: The genome has about 6 billion letters in a cell, and each letter (base pair) adds about a third of a nanometer of length.

    Source: National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH), Introduction to Genomics

  4. 4. How many movie tickets did moviegoers in the US and Canada buy in 2025?

    The answer: about 769 million. That's about two tickets per person.

    Napkin math
    1. 370Mpeople in the US and Canada
    2. ×3movies each a year

    ≈1.11Btickets

    Source: Pew Research Center, As the Academy Awards approach, a look at moviegoing habits in the United States

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