End of chapter 4 activity :chain letters
You may well have received a letter reading something like this:
How do you like receiving letters? Most of us do, and this letter is to guarantee that you receive hundreds of letters, All you have to do is to send a letter to the person at the top of the list below .Then copy out this letter 5 times, take off the top person from the list and add your name at the bottom. Then send the five copies to five of your best friends.
1. John Smith 3, Pete Black 5. Claire Jones
2. Sara Ing 4. Imran Patel
P.s. Don't break the chain and don't tell the post office.
Let us consider how true is the claim that you will receive hundreds of letters. This letter takes 5 stages to move you up to the top of the list .
Therefore your 5 friends will send letters to 5 friends who will send letters to 5 friends who will send letters to 5 friends who will send letters to 5 friends who will all send me a letter.
1. How many letters will l receive if the chain has not been broken? (Not 25!)
2. How many letters should I receive if there were 6 people on the list and i had sent letters to 6 friends?
3. How many letters would I receive if there were 5 people on the list but everybody in the chain sent 4. Investigate this for different numbers of people on the list and different numbers of copies. Can you find a rule for the number of letters that you receive in theory and the number of copies that you send out?
5. One of the most famous chain letter 'scams' and one of the reasons that they are illegal) asked you to send £10 to the person at the top of the list. and then sell' your letters for £1 each to ten other people. This time there was a list of £10 people before you were sent the 10s. How many people should have been in the chain by then? How does this compare to the population of Britain?
A great many people lost their £10 because everybody else had heard of it first and most people broke the chain!