• Question: How long would it take to walk around the world.

    Asked by seandennigan721 to Angela, Gabriele, Karen, Maria, Shane on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Angela Stevenson

      Angela Stevenson answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      ohhh it’s a math’s problem! nice one 🙂 well lets do the maths together. An average person walks at a speed of 3mph, the distance around the world is 24,901 miles… that’s 8300 hrs if walking constantly, but that’s impossible so lets say you walk 12 hours per day, that’s 690 days, which is about 2 yrs (remember there’s 365 days/yr). That’s a really long time! I would follow the man of steel’s example and just fly rather than walk 😉 Thanks for asking, great question 🙂

    • Photo: Karen McCarthy

      Karen McCarthy answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      I love Angela’s answer, makes maths seem more enjoyable when you apply it to funny problems like this! 🙂

    • Photo: Gabriele De Chiara

      Gabriele De Chiara answered on 12 Nov 2013:


      Hello, let’s say that we walk at 6km/hr and that we walk for 8 hours a day so that’s 48km a day. The circumference of the earth is 40 000 km. So in principle we would need 40 000/ 48 = 833 days which is 2 years, 3 months and 13 days. However we should consider that there is not any path on the ground around the earth, so at some point we would need to swim!

    • Photo: Shane Mc Guinness

      Shane Mc Guinness answered on 13 Nov 2013:


      And if we want to make it really complicated we could look at the distant of all those ups and downs of you walking along the seabed wearing a diving suit! If you’re walking along the equator you’d do an awful lot of seabed walking. So the distance would be a lot longer and would take longer. Or if you want to do it by land only, well that’s a lot of zig-zagging across continents.
      Great question. It really got me thinking.

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