3QUESTION 3 OF 3
Answer & explanation
The official answer, with Fermi’s reasoning step by step.
Answer & explanation
Official answer
988,000,000
people
How to estimate it
Fermi’s official “Napkin math”
The easiest place to start is China, about 1.4 billion people. How many grow up speaking Mandarin at home? Not everyone, since Cantonese, Shanghainese and others are huge. Maybe 2 in 3.
- China's population
- 1,400,000,000
- Grow up with Mandarin
- ≈ 2 in 3
- 1.4B × 2/3
- ≈ 930,000,000
Rounded assumptions may give a slightly different estimate. The official answer above is the game’s reference value.
Source calculation & reference
- Ethnologue 2026: Mandarin Chinese first-language speakers
- 988 million
- Next largest, Spanish
- 487 million
- ≈
- 988,000,000 people
Reference cited by Fermi: Ethnologue (2026): 988 million first-language speakers of Mandarin Chinese
How close was your guess?
Your comparison will appear here.
Compare by ratio: divide the larger number by the smaller one. The closer to 1×, the better.