Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math
by Aimee Picchi
Problem 1
It is 7 p.m. on a snowy January evening, and Penny is a 13-year-old who likes fruity lip balms, wears leggings, and notices everything, like how she's expected to wash the dishes but her older brother is excused to finish his homework. On this night, she insists her brother do the dishes because she has an algebra test and it's only fair. Her parents explain girls can do anything--everything, in fact. She can wash the dishes plus get top grades. Her brother smirks as he escapes upstairs. Penny scrubs the dishes extra hard as she thinks about the unknowns in her life, like what she could do if she weren't expected to excel at everything. She dries her hands on her leggings and reapplies her strawberry lip balm, then walks through the split-level house, running her hands along drywall and peering into closets. She hopes to find a portal to a world with a warm patriarchal figure who will encourage her to spend long days in a library without any housework duties. After two hours, she gives up.
Using only paper and pencil, estimate the equivalency of one pair of leggings to nylons and one lip balm to lipsticks, if l = lipsticks and n = nylons, and then calculate the nearest portal's location and extrapolate why Penny was unable to find it.
Problem 2
At 16, Penny is excelling in math. Her teacher gives her his mobile number, telling her to text if she needs trig help. She takes him up on his offer. His texts become personal. Acutely personal. She reports him to the school, and the teacher receives a disciplinary hearing. The math teacher forwards portions of their texts--only the tangential, innocuous comments--to an old frat buddy, claiming Penny is a girl angling for attention. That friend forwards the texts to two more friends, etc., etc. She becomes known as the girl who entrapped a beloved teacher. Although the teacher is fired, she becomes a school outcast. Her parents blame her for being obtuse: Penny should have known better, they say, unless she's the type to lead on older men. When her parents are asleep, she probes the air in her bedroom with an X-Acto knife, hoping it might slice open a portal to a world where girls and women aren't blamed when men prey on them. She fails to find one.
Using "Dodgson's Treatise on the Geometry of Doorway Magics" and the modern theory of portal probability, estimate the likelihood a random selection of 100 cutting implements would open a portal such as the one Penny was searching for. Please complete your calculation before moving to the next problem.
Problem 3
Penny is now 20 and working as an ecommerce warehouse packer. Her parents don't have money to send her to college after paying her brother's tuition, so she is saving to enroll herself. She's dating a co-worker who plays esports and is a black belt. Her girlfriend writes funny but devastating tweets that get retweeted by celebrities; she drinks whiskey and reads comic books, even those with obscure Marvel superheroes. The men in the warehouse look up to her. She's awesome, totally ballsy, and Penny is heartbroken when she finds a note from her girlfriend on a warehouse shelf, explaining she'd found a portal to a world needing a savior like her. Penny peers behind shelves of toilet scrubbers and princess dolls, but the portal never appears for her.
