Ballpark

Puzzle #34 · 23 October 2026

The five questions from that day's Ballpark, each with its answer, the fact behind it and a link to the source. Rather play it first? It is in the archive.

1. As of 2018, about how many babies had been born worldwide through IVF since the first in 1978?

8M babies

More than 8 million, an international monitoring committee reported in July 2018, forty years after the birth of Louise Brown, the first IVF baby. Source

Image: Dr Elena Kontogianni · CC0

2. How many transistors were in the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor (1971)?

2,300 transistors

2,300, squeezed into a 16-pin package. Source

Image: Thomas Nguyen · CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped

3. How many copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, printed in 1623, are known to survive today, per the Folger Shakespeare Library?

235 copies

235 copies, two of them found in 2016. About 750 were probably printed, and without the book 18 plays, Macbeth among them, might have been lost. Source

Image: Andreas Praefcke · Public domain

4. How much height did Mount St. Helens lose in its 1980 eruption?

1,314 feet

1,314 ft: the summit went from 9,677 ft to 8,363 ft. The ash column reached about 80,000 ft in less than 15 minutes. Source

Image: Ted Quackenbush · CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped

5. How old is Lake Baikal in Siberia, the world's oldest lake, according to UNESCO?

25M years

About 25 million years. Baikal is also the world's deepest lake and holds 20% of the planet's unfrozen fresh water. Source

Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0, cropped