Yesterday I had to put some motor oil in the car.
As I was pouring the oil from the bottle into the engine, I started thinking about how the price of crude oil has dropped so dramatically in the past 12 months. As I watched the flow of oil from the bottle dwindle from a stream, to a dribble, to a drip, drip, drip, I began wondering about the cost of each little teardrop of oil.
That thought took me back to grade school math problems:
Timmy has 32 drops of motor oil. Martha has twice as many drops as Sam, but only 3/5 as many as Timmy. If the price of crude oil dropped to $55 a barrel, what is the cost of all of Martha’s drops of oil?
Answers via comments below.
Martha has 19.2 drops of oil. Sam is irrelevant to the question.
There are approximately 91,000 drops of fluid in a gallon. There are 42 gallons per barrel of crude oil. That’s approximately 3,822,000 drops. At $55 per barrel, each drop would cost 0.07 cents wholesale Assuming that Martha has crude oil, she would have approximately 1.5 cents worth wholesale.