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The precise placement of a decimal point can be the difference between life and death. Or... at least, between placing at the Olympics and falling...
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Description:
The precise placement of a decimal point can be the difference between life and death. Or... at least, between placing at the Olympics and falling short. Although we hear a fourth place finish at the Games feels like death.
Transcript
- 00:04
place value a la shmoop speedy O'Connor has been training all [Speedy running outdoors]
- 00:08
spring for the Summer Olympics to practice he's been running around and
- 00:12
around his parents living room honestly it's driving them nuts makes it
- 00:16
really hard to watch television at last the big day arrives and speedy runs his [Speedy running on a track]
- 00:21
best event, the 400 meters it was a close finish so he eagerly looks up at
Full Transcript
- 00:26
the board to find his exact time only to see that he ran the race in four hundred
- 00:31
seventy two point three seconds huh that can't be right if you divide that [Girl shaking her head]
- 00:36
number by 60 it works out to almost eight minutes and there's no way he was
- 00:40
that slow while Phillip the timekeeper must be responsible for this...
- 00:44
that guy was always having decimal issues speedy goes to talk to Phillip [Speedy speaks to Philip]
- 00:48
and give him a piece of his mind as it stood speedy showed a time of 472.3
- 00:55
seconds that's a 4 in the hundredths place seven in a tens place a 2 in the
- 00:59
ones and a 3 in the tenths place...Speedy alerted the timekeeper to his error but
- 01:07
then overcompensated by moving the decimal two spaces to the left now the
- 01:11
board showed that speedy had run his race in a time of 4.723 seconds
- 01:16
that's a 4 in the ones place a 7 in the tenths place a 2 in the hundredths place
- 01:23
and a 3 in the thousandths place it's a great time but not humanly possible so [Robots running]
- 01:30
speedy asked the timekeeper to try again this time the timekeeper moved the
- 01:34
decimal only one spot to the right giving speedy
- 01:36
a time of 47.23 seconds that's more like it looking up the board
- 01:41
speedy sees that swifty Stephenson posted a time of 47.18 seconds
- 01:46
rapido Roosevelt posted a time of 47.19
- 01:48
seconds and nippy Nottingham's posted a time of 47.22
- 01:52
seconds just barely edging out speedy and keeping him off [Speedy stood beside podium]
- 01:57
the podium oh well to give you an idea of how small that number in the hundreds
- 02:02
place can be check out how little difference there was between the four
- 02:05
runners one hundredths of a second is all that separated speedy and nippy and
- 02:09
there are a hundred of those in a single second talk about close all right it's
- 02:15
disappointing but speedy is a competitor and he's not gonna let this get him down [Speedy running around a couch with his parents sat]
- 02:19
it's back to his parents living room for another four years