The movie Die Hard 3 is a good movie with an excellent plot. The basic gist of the movie is that the brother of the bad guy from the first movie, whom New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) killed, wants to extract vengeance on his brother's killer. So he has McClane running all over New York City, picking up telephones, solving puzzles and stopping bombs. A fairly boring plot, at least until McClane doesn't follow the rules and the bad guy blows up a subway stop and reveals that he has planted a bomb in a school somewhere and if they evacuate the schools, he will blow the entire school to kingdom come.
Then, while the cops are all out searching for the bomb, the audience becomes privy to the fact that the bad guys are actually after all the gold in the federal reserve . . . which just so happens to be the building right next to the subway stop that was blown up. The bad guys were after one hundred forty billion dollars in gold. They smuggled all that gold out of the city in fourteen dump trucks.
My brother and I enjoy pointing out movie mistakes and we began to wonder . . . how many dump trucks would it take to carry 140,000,000,000? Please note that the movie was made in 1995 and I will be doing my calculations according to how much gold was worth in that year. And I will be including the websites from which I garnered the information.
First, to discover how much the gold weighs.
One bard of gold is approximately 27.5lbs (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_the_bar_of_gold_at_fort_knox_weight_62.25_pounds)
One bar of gold (in 1995) was worth $372.45 at the lowest, $395.55 at the highest, and $384.05 was the average price. (http://www.taxfreegold.co.uk/goldpricechart.html)
Now, the prices are per ounce, and since we're dealing in pounds I will multiply the number. And we're using the average worth of gold. One bar of gold, weighing one pound, in the year 1995 and rounded off to the second decimal point, was worth $6,144.80
According to those numbers, the bad guys stole 22,783,491 bars of gold. We already know how much each bar weighs, so we simply multiply the number of bars by how much each weighs, which is 27.5lbs. So they stole gold weighing 626,546,002.5lbs.
Now, a big, heavy-duty triple axle garbage truck can carry, at the most, fifteen tons. (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_tons_can_an_STANDARD_dump_truck_carry) When we translate how many pounds the gold weighs into how many tons, it weighs 313,273 tons. We divide that number by how many tons a dump truck can hold, which is fifteen tons, and we get the answer as to how many dump trucks would the bad guys have truly needed to steal all that gold.
The answer? 20,884 dump trucks.
Feel free to correct any information are not accurate. I realize that Wiki and Wikianswers are not the best sites to gather information from. I didn't worry too much on accuracy because no matter how off the numbers are, the basic fact is the same: you can't smuggle one hundred forty billions dollars of gold in fourteen dump trucks.
