You can take the guessing out of ‘how many things are in the jar’ games by using a simple maths trick – it guarantees you’re always very close to the correct answer every single time
Turns out the maths we learnt in school does have a use in the real world.
If you’ve ever been to a fair or a charity event, you’ll probably have seen those games with jars filled with various items such as sweets or marbles. The idea of the game is to guess how many items are inside the jar, and the person with the closest guess wins a prize – which is often the contents of the jar itself.
You might think this is purely a guessing game, but it turns out there’s a trick to it – and you’ll know exactly how to work out the answer if you paid attention in maths class. Thankfully, even for those of us who didn’t, a woman on TikTok has told us exactly how it should be done.
Alex, who posts under the username @smallex4ft11, said she had previously seen a video sharing the hack, and said using it herself paid off.
She said: “I went to the Stitch Festival at the weekend and they had this big glass bowl of small balls of yarn. They were like, if you can guess how many balls of yarn are in here, you will win the basket of yarn. So I was like, absolutely! I remember what I have been taught.
“I went and counted how many balls of yarn were touching the bottom, and it was six. And then I counted how many were touching the side, and it was six. And then I couldn’t get around the other side but I guessed it would also be six because it was a sphere [shaped jar]. So I did 6 x 6 x 6 and I guessed 216.
“I haven’t received an email yet, but my mum received an email because she also entered the competition, and it said ‘Thank you for entering our competition! Can you imagine we managed to fit 216 balls of yarn in the bowl? Congratulations to our winner Alex Trueman who has won and guessed it exactly right’.
“That’s right, of course I guessed it exactly right because I had maths on my side. I never win anything, this is so exciting!”
In maths terms, the sum you’re trying to do is height multiplied by width multiplied by length. The sum will vary depending on the shape of the jar you’re looking at, but ultimately you want to work out the volume of whatever container you’re working with.
Commenters on the post were blown away by the hack. One person said: “I need to learn this!” While another added: “I’m a maths teacher … I’m using your video in my class the next time my students ask me why they’re learning maths.”
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