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TV show and real money

Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Tuesday, 9 December 2008, at 4:16 p.m.

In Response To: Rounding errors... (Chuck Bower)

(I've actually mentioned this show here before.)

There is a TV show, The Biggest Loser where contestants compete for losing the most weight, in relative terms.

Each week the remaining contestants weigh in and the two who lost the least (percentagewise) are up for a vote by the other contestants as to which one is kicked out of the competition.

They weigh to the nearest pound but then calculate the %-age loss to several decimal places and base the cutoff on those many decimal place %-age numbers.

The lowest two typically have lost 3-5 lbs for the week. Occasionally the weight loss for the two lowest is the same in terms of pounds. The contestants' total weights vary wildly (partly depending upon when in the competition the weigh in occurs, but mostly because the initial weights vary wildly) from the high hundreds to over 400 lb. It's not uncommon for the two lowest weight losers for the week to differ in the second significant figure, e.g. 2.1% vs. 2.3%.

So, the numerator is a single digit number with nothing beyond the decimal point and the denominator is a three digit number (also no decimal places).

BTW, these contestants are 'playing' for a first prize of $250k.

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