Any calcluation that supports your answer is extra credit!
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Minneapolis, Minnesota
"How many cigar smokers are in Chicago?" - That was the question I was asked in an interview yesterday. Since 'googleing' for the answer didn't help at all, I want to put it to all of you. According to the book The Wisdom of Crowds, a group of people's average answers can be remarkably close to the correct answer for certain questions. Please - everyone put an answer in the comments and let's see what we come up with!
Any calcluation that supports your answer is extra credit!
Any calcluation that supports your answer is extra credit!
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4 comments:
Sweet IB question. Well, according to the Securities Industry Association, nationally there are 786k jobs in the securities industry. We will say that roughly 5% of them are in Chicago. Since all cigar smokers are involved in the securities industry in one form or another and all in the securities industry smoke cigars, that puts us at about 40k cigar smokers in Chicago.
Evidently they want an answer back from you, eh?
The population of Chicago is 2,896,016 according to the Wikipedia.
And the Registered Dental Hygenist says, "According to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), 4.8 percent of persons aged 12 or older (more than 10 million individuals) were current cigar users (smoked cigars within the past month)."
Since we're looking for an abstract number and we're using data from five years ago, let's just figure 4.8% of Chicago's population smokes cigars.
So that leaves us with 139,009 cigar smokers in Chicago.
Do I get the signing bonus? ;)
I love these interview questions. Without using Google to find any data and pulling numbers out of my butt…
I believe the Chicago Metro area is the third larges in the US, with about 8 million people. This gives us a “universe” of 8 million people.
I believe only about 1/5 the population smoke. Using my own experience, only 1/5 of the smokers smoke cigars. This leaves roughly 1/25 of the general population as cigar smoker. Or 240,000 people in the Chicago area.
Here's how I looked at it. There are roughly 3M people in the Twin Cities and so probably 10M in Chicagoland. 10% of them use tobacco and 10% of people that use tobacco, smoke cigars. So I said 100,000 people.
I was told it was the fastest someone came up with an answer. Not sure if that was good or bad!
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