Associate Consultant Interview Questions

My answer would have been the same: "Pretty much all of them!" :)

planes leave, people board.

ALL OF EM ! (and to elaborate - The no. of ppl flying in + the no. of ppl flying out --all leave basically some on foot and other on air

All leave except for Tom Hanks, he stays stuck in "The Terminal"....... (You have to include some humor when you answer :)

50k

how is this a brain teaser?

This question tests how you think critically. In this example, you could start with estimating that JFK has about 100 gates, and that a plane leaves from a gate every 3 hours, totaling 800 flights per day. Guessing that the average plane holds 200 passengers, you arrive at 160,000 per day departing. The interviewer is not as interested that you get the right, or even close, answer, but rather the thought process you go through to figure it out. For those that are interested, the real number is about 131,000 per day based on statistics from 2007.

the question was "How many passengers leave JFK airport on a given day.?" my answer is the (number of people arrives that day )+( the employees work there (except for the security guards)) after all no-one stays on the airport forever

The answer is the thought process, as above. Personally, I'd have started with the number of flights: flight frequency per runway * runways * open hours. Assume half are leaving, then guess the number of passengers per plane. I might also point out that the number of assumptions multiplied together in that calc is such that you're unlikely to be within an order of magnitude of the right answer...

Tim Besse stole my answer! And I thought I was the only one who thought of that. Seriously though, if I was asked this question in an interview I would answer "probably about half" figuring that half the flights are departing and half are arrivals, similar to what another poster stated. Depending on the position you are interviewing for they may be impressed by you going through a long critical calculation, I don't know. In my line of work, character is more important that pure intelligence.

all of them

100% 1. Those passengers that arrive on an airplane either leave by another plane or leave the airport by other means. 2. Those passengers that arrive by other means take a plane and leave or they are not passengers. 3. That is, if you exclude those that are still there at midnight. You can assume this number is constant from night to night.

Well, there are passengers in cars that come and go, those onboard planes that do the same and some perhaps catching a lift on a bicycle or maybe even piggyback. If there are those that try to actually ride on JFK, he's dead, so - good luck.

I would have to agree with those that say all of them. However I must point out an addition to the facts. We are all assuming something when answering these types of problems and as such the answers are as much subjective as they maybe factual. To the rest here, READ the question. Passengers are ON the planes if not then they are NOT passengers! ALL passengers leave eventually however what is a 'day' not specified as 24hrs- because a 24hr period COULD span 2 'days'. ALSO it is possible that a plane could be held hostage on the tarmac for more than 24hrs - these passengers would not leave on the same 'day' so our total may be slightly less than 100% on any given day. Ultimately though, I agree that it is the interviewer's 'hidden' question that counts. With these types of questions the answers are not so mathematically obvious. But rather, the questioner is looking deeper into your logic, character, personality etc. Are you a thinker, do you think out-side the box, do you get frustrated, are you a smart-ass, etc. That's been my experience

not all them. because som arrive at one day and leave the next day. My answer will be "A LOT!"

the answer does not require a number but how will you find out. It depends on the day of the year and also on how many people are actually on the plane and if all of them are going to JFK or are catching connecting flights.

105 degrees

52.5

60 degrees, or 300 degrees whichever way you want to look at it.

|0.5(60H-11M)| = 105 degrees

1/4 of 180 which is 45 ta-daaah

oops, I mean 1/4 of 360 :) 90

105 degrees: if the hour hand is right at 9, and the minute had was right at 30 then it would be 90 degrees. but since we're 30 minutes into the hr, the hour hand will be (theoretically) half waybetween 9 and 10pm. so you need to calculate that additional variation. If have the arms 3 hrs apart makes a perfect 90 degrees, then each hr would equal 30 degrees -> thus a half hr would result in a 15 degrees. 90+15= 105 degrees

61.25

If they are just occupying the space and there is no need to live there, the entire population of the world could theoretically be in Texas at the same time.

Presuming you aren't given the size of texas... Population of New York City: 8 million. Population of the world? 7 billion. Could you fit 1000 New York Cities in to Texas? Probably not. You can check it with numbers, 300sq mi for NYC, 250k sq mi for Texas. You could then go a step further and say that if we were only concerned with how many people can we cram in there, then we could probably increase the density of NYC by an order of magnitude at least, in which case yes, we could probably fit the whole world in there. An assumption that you can fit NYC in a 100 times (a reasonable if not low estimate), and that you could probably fit 80 million people in to New York city if they all squeeze together, you would get a total fit of about 8 billion people could fit in Texas.