Java Reference
In-Depth Information
2.38 How many cubic miles of water flow out of the mouth of the Mississippi
River each day? DO NOT look up the answer or any supplemental facts. Be
sure to describe all assumptions made in arriving at your answer.
2.39 When buying a home mortgage, you often have the option of paying some
money in advance (called “discount points”) to get a lower interest rate. As-
sume that you have the choice between two 15-year fixed-rate mortgages:
one at 8% with no up-front charge, and the other at 7
3
4
% with an up-front
charge of 1% of the mortgage value. How long would it take to recover the
1% charge when you take the mortgage at the lower rate? As a second, more
precise estimate, how long would it take to recover the charge plus the in-
terest you would have received if you had invested the equivalent of the 1%
charge in the bank at 5% interest while paying the higher rate? DO NOT use
a calculator to help you answer this question.
2.40 When you build a new house, you sometimes get a “construction loan” which
is a temporary line of credit out of which you pay construction costs as they
occur. At the end of the construction period, you then replace the construc-
tion loan with a regular mortgage on the house. During the construction loan,
you only pay each month for the interest charged against the actual amount
borrowed so far. Assume that your house construction project starts at the
beginning of April, and is complete at the end of six months. Assume that
the total construction cost will be $300,000 with the costs occurring at the be-
ginning of each month in $50,000 increments. The construction loan charges
6% interest. Estimate the total interest payments that must be paid over the
life of the construction loan.
2.41 Here are some questions that test your working knowledge of how fast com-
puters operate. Is disk drive access time normally measured in milliseconds
(thousandths of a second) or microseconds (millionths of a second)? Does
your RAM memory access a word in more or less than one microsecond?
How many instructions can your CPU execute in one year if the machine is
left running at full speed all the time? DO NOT use paper or a calculator to
derive your answers.
2.42 Does your home contain enough topics to total one million pages?
How
many total pages are stored in your school library building?
2.43 How many words are in this topic?
2.44 How many hours are one million seconds? How many days? Answer these
questions doing all arithmetic in your head.
2.45 How many cities and towns are there in the United States?
2.46 How many steps would it take to walk from Boston to San Francisco?
2.47 A man begins a car trip to visit his in-laws. The total distance is 60 miles,
and he starts off at a speed of 60 miles per hour. After driving exactly 1 mile,
he loses some of his enthusiasm for the journey, and (instantaneously) slows
