14-6 Eight thousand fans at a football game scream "charge!!" at the prompting of the announcer. The decibel meter reads 80 dB for the sound level. How may fans would be needed to make the decibel meter read 90 dB, assuming they all scream with the same loudness?

 Solution: If the answer were as easy as 9,000 then the question probably wouldn’t have been asked. The real question here is, "What the heck is a dB?!" It stands for decibel. And decibels are weird. For starters, 0 dB is not no sound at all. It is the threshold of hearing (the softest whisper you can hear). Also 1dB + 1dB ¹ 2dB. What it comes down to is that every 10 dB increment is 10 times more sound intensity. So the answer to the question is that it would take 10 times as many fans, or 80,000 fans, to reach 90 dB. The dB scale is a logarithmic scale. An analogy would be that 10⁹ is ten times larger than 10⁸. Comparing the 9 and the 8 is analogous to comparing the 90 dB to the 80 dB.