My daughter had a 6 hour assessment with TSB yesterday. (Trying to get a years placement as part of her degree)

She's 1 of 12 selected from 250 odd. So fingers crossed.

Anyway they were given something like 5 minutes to answer 2 questions. One was how many people could of you fit shoulder to shoulder on the Isle of Wight?? However it was the other one that we can't seem to work out. 'At any given moment how many commercial planes are flying over the UK?' She came up with 90!! I thinks it's more like 500. Google isnt helping.

Any good guesses welcome ....

Something like http://www.flightradar24.com/ might help with the 2nd question, but I'm not sure if it includes all commercial planes.

Currently just over 100 (think it's 103 but I'm not sure on UK airspace boundaries in the North Sea), 23 of which are in the stack at Heathrow.

90 was a good guess.

Flightradar suggests under a couple of hundred over the UK out of about ten thousand planes flying worldwide.

The Isle of Wight one is easy: a person is about 2 square feet (even in this expanded age) in cross section, and the IoW is 380km^2; about 3,800,000,000 square feet. So you could fit 1.7 billion people on the island... of course, it might *sink*.

Averaged out over the year I would say 238. That's per hour 24 hours a day. Nights are extremely quiet even in the summer and winter dayshifts have nothing on an August morning shift!

When you get these questions do the want to see how you were thinking rather than anything like an accurate answer, The aircraft one is probably more complex but the isle of wight on. Well first off how big is the isle of wight. how wide is a person. How many people can you actually stand shoulder to shoulder - would that just be one line across the island or would it count if they where behind each other. I dunno, I don't even have a coop nowadays just sayin'

Thank you all for the swift answers. Re the planes. I guess that's why she's doing the Maths degree and I stopped at O levels

Re the Isle of wight. One of the girls there didn't know it was and island. So not sure how she will do

Is the tide in or out on the Isle of Wight?

Well, there's a 67 mile coastal path, so if the tide goes out thirty yards, that's another square mile added (call it 2.25 square km). Depends how steep the boundary is.

I might write to Randall Munroe and ask him to scientifically analyse what would happen to the South coast if the Isle of Wight were to disappear.

That's a What If? I would enjoy reading.

Doesn't the answers given so far assume that the people on the Isle of Wight are standing up, they could be laying down and stacked on top of one another. In which case the sky's the limit.

To a point, I don't think they want dead squashed people!

Did anyone think about how you would get them there, then off again?

Once you've got them on there, letting them off again would, I feel, be counterproductive...

/me stretches luxuriously!

The answer is an almost infinite number if they were lying down and on top of each other but there would be a restriction art altitude and outside earth's gravity!