💻🤔📕
I have recently been reading an ebook* that is quite long and has endnotes. Because my ebook reader only tells me my current positions in the actual body of the book and the endnotes, I have been wondering how much of the book I have actually read. Right now, my reader tells me I’m on block 8577 in the book’s body and block 22884 in the endnotes section. Note that a “block” can be thought of as a segment of the book’s text, be it a group of words or characters. For example, each block could be 120 characters, including blank spaces.
To solve this mystery, I gathered the following extra information from the book’s table of contents.
Total number of blocks in book: 24506
Starting block of endnotes: 21434
Can you figure out, to the nearest percent, how much of the book I’ve read?
Solution:
* To avoid any copyright complications I’ve chosen not to state the book’s title. Ditto with the make of the ebook reader.
†I have been somewhat disingenuous here with regard to the nature of this problem. My ebook reader does show the percents of each position, i.e. body position shows up as 35%; endnotes position as 92%. Moreover, to get the percentage of where the endnotes begin, I only need to navigate to that section in the book (i.e. 86%). I thought the problem would have been too easy if I just gave the percentages, however, rather than having you figure them out.