Food conversion?!?!

[Guest]

How to convert :1 cup of nut,
1/2 cup Buttermilk,
1 cup Margarine,
1 and half a cup Marshmallows - Miniature to grams?
And how small would the miniature marshmallows be?

[Guest]

All problems of converting volume to mass involve finding the density of the material, and then usually some unit conversion.
Two sources for finding (approximate) density information on common foods:
1) The USDA database http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
When you search and find a food it gives you nuitritional info for an "official serving" usually in grams plus a measure in "customary units"
2) The nutritional label on the food itself. It gives the serving size in grams and customary measure. This is always for a single serving and you may need some scaling to get to the units used in a recipe.

Europeans don't weigh everything. Liquid ingredients would likely be measured, but in milliliters.

Marshmellows: Full size are about an inch in diameter and an inch high. Miniature are about 0.25-0.375" in both dimensions. The large ones don't pack in a cup well and would probably be counted in a recipe.

[Guest]

The Just Born Candy Company of Poplar Grove, Illinois, makes 20 billion jelly beans each year, and runs 16 hrs per day, 5 days per week year round. The typical jelly bean is an ellipsoid that measures 15mm by 9 mm by 9 mm. Starting on Friday, January 2, 2004, and taking no holidays until April 8, 2005, if the jelly bean production was laid end to end, how many complete circles of the earth (which is 12,756 km in diameter) could be completed by April 8, 2005?

Does anyone know how to solve this? I need help beause I am lost!

[Guest]

The Just Born Candy Company of Poplar Grove, Illinois, makes 20 billion jelly beans each year, and runs 16 hrs per day, 5 days per week year round. The typical jelly bean is an ellipsoid that measures 15mm by 9 mm by 9 mm. Starting on Friday, January 2, 2004, and taking no holidays until April 8, 2005, if the jelly bean production was laid end to end, how many complete circles of the earth (which is 12,756 km in diameter) could be completed by April 8, 2005?

Does anyone know how to solve this? I need help beause I am lost!

This breaks into two problems:
*How many jelly beans does it take to circle the earth
*How many jelly beans are made in the specified time period.

The answer is the second number divided by the first. I assume this is a school problem, so I'm only going to give hints and NOT work the answer for you.
1) From the diameter, determine the circumference and convert it first to millimeters, then to jelly beans. Yes you can measure in jelly beans and 1 jelly bean/15 mm is just as valid as any other conversion constant.

2) For the second number, they tell you 20 billion jelly beans per year but they give you some irregular period. You need to know how many are made in a work week, day, or hour, and how many work weeks, days, or hours are in the specified period. There are multiple ways to approach this, but the two periods begin and end on a Friday and so there are an integer number of five day work weeks in the interval. I will use work weeks.

If you look at a calendar, it is exactly 52 weeks from 2004-01-02 to 2004-12-31, and another 14 weeks to 2005-04-08. There are exactly 66 weeks of 5 workdays (330 work days).

Now the problem is what to do with the 20 billion/year. 52 weeks x 7 days = 364 days. Therefore, there ar 52 weeks, plus either one or two odd days in a year (2 for leap year), and they may be work days or fall on a weekend. There are 260-262 work days for this plant in a year (real plants have less due to holidays). You could look at a calendar and determine the right number for any year, but the 20 billion is probably an average over several years, including leap and regular years. Except for century years which are not leap years, the calendar repeats in 28 year cycles and 28 years has 1461 weeks (of 5 work days) exactly.

This could be addressed other ways, but I am going to use
20 billion beans/year x 28 years/1461 weeks = 383.3 million jelly beans per week. We determined the number of weeks earlier.

After you crunch all the numbers, you should get an answer between 9 and 10 times.