Sunday, February 15, 2009

M&M Math

Last night we were watching the History of Chocolate (or some such show) and they mentioned the percentages of colors in the average M&M bag. Someone in the family wondered out loud if that was really true...and could we prove it? I just happened to have one of those "big" bags of M&Ms in the pantry. Justine needs to bring one for her camp out with the Girl Scouts next weekend and well, they were on sale buy one/get one free...so I happened to have an extra bag for the test. So, here are our results!


M&Ms all divided up.
Everyone helped in the division of color. And, believe it or not, no one ate any!

Look at Mike's face...I think he just found out he has to wait to eat the M&Ms!
Our Results
Total in bag: 636
Average % of color in bag per web site:
Blue 24%
Orange 20%
Brown 13%
Red 13%
Yellow 14%
Green 16%
Our percentages from the "big" bag:
Blue 18%
Orange 18%
Brown 12%
Red 15%
Yellow 17%
Green 20%
You can clearly see that our percentages differ from the average given on the web site. This could be because we used a "big" bag instead of the regular sized bag. Maybe more research is required...no argument from the kids (or Mike).
Um...did you notice that the highest percentage in our bag was Green? On Valentine's Day...how funny is that?!




1 comment:

  1. Oooh this brings out the statistician in me. How many bags would you need to go through to get statistically relevant results?

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