[tomtoise]

At University we had a question around this type of 'transfer'. I can't remember how it went exactly but we were to calculate the bandwidth of a jumbo plane carrying x amount of hard drives with y capacity to z destination. Given that the flight takes so many hours, what is the total transfer speed of data in seconds?

I saw a few students nearly have a breakdown over that one.

[kingbirdy]

Why? It's just x * y / time

[tomtoise]

Yes, to those who had studied it was fairly obvious what the solution was, but the phrasing was such that to those who were just trying to wing it failed miserably.

[cmdrfred]

I can solve that problem and I dropped out of high school. Simple math is something that has to be studied for at the college level?

[tomtoise]

Yes - the first year of University was designed as a catch-up to those who hadn't previously had exposure to this sort of thing and weed out the coasters.

I must stress this was a single question on a single first-year exam. Not representative of the whole course in the slightest.

[acchow]

You just need to get the units to line up.

You want bytes/seconds (i.e. quantity of data per unit time).

You have:

- Distance per unit time (km/h)

- Payloads per unit distance (# of flights per km)

- Quantity of data per payload (bytes per flight)