2QUESTION 2 OF 3
Answer & explanation
Counting factory-made cigarettes, not hand-rolled ones.
The official answer, with Fermi’s reasoning step by step.
Answer & explanation
Official answer
14,000,000,000
cigarettes
How to estimate it
Fermi’s official “Napkin math”
The easiest place to start is the world population, about 8 billion. How many of them smoke? Maybe 1 in 8, and each one gets through about half a pack a day.
- World population
- 8,000,000,000
- Smoke
- ≈ 1 in 8
- Half a pack each a day
- × 10
- 8B ÷ 8 × 10
- ≈ 10 billion
Rounded assumptions may give a slightly different estimate. The official answer above is the game’s reference value.
Source calculation & reference
- Cigarettes smoked worldwide in a year (Tobacco Atlas, 2019)
- ≈ 5 trillion
- Days in a year
- ÷ 365
- ≈
- 14 billion
Reference cited by Fermi: The Tobacco Atlas (Vital Strategies and Economics for Health): more than 5 trillion cigarettes smoked worldwide in 2019
How close was your guess?
Your comparison will appear here.
Compare by ratio: divide the larger number by the smaller one. The closer to 1×, the better.