Pencil and Paper Activity:
Aspirin Math for Middle Schoolers

For the following questions, assume each aspirin tablet contains 325 mg of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA).

1. Aspirin companies estimate that Americans consume 80 million aspirin tablets each day. On that basis, how many aspirins were consumed in 1999?

2. If the population of the United States last year was 270 million, on average, how many aspirins did each person in the United States use last year? (Round your answer to the nearest whole number.) Is this a realistic number per person? Why? Why not?

3. Today aspirin is made from crude oil, not willow bark. But if we did use willow bark, 1 kilogram of willow bark could produce about 27 grams of aspirin.
   1. Since one can only strip about 91 kg (91,000 g) of bark from a willow tree without killing it, how many 325 milligram tablets of aspirin could be made from one willow tree?

   2. How many willow trees would it take to make the 80 million aspirin tablets consumed each day in the United States alone?

   3. Given that one acre of wet ground can support about 15 willow trees, how much land would be needed to produce one day's supply of aspirin for the United States?