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From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: net.puzzle
Subject: Re: Xenia and New York  * ANSWER *
Message-ID: <784@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 22:46:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: lsuc.784
Posted: Fri Sep  6 22:46:20 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Sep-85 23:17:49 EDT
References: <1017@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 77
Summary: Sorry, that's out of date; and a new question.

Mitchell Marks (mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP) writes:
> I just realized that I never gave the answer to a puzzle I posted a few
> weeks ago.  (Nobody else gave it a try, anyway.)  Sorry.
> 	The following is a restatement, not a quotation -- I don't have
> it stored anywhere.  
> 	The question:  What do Xenia (Ohio) and New York (NY) have in common,
> a world distinction not shared by any other U.S. city?  That is, there are a
> number of cities in the world with this distinction, but the only two in
> the U.S. are Xenia and New York.
> 
> 	Answer: each is the largest city in the world for a given letter
> of the alphabet. ...
>   The puzzle was posed and answered a couple of years ago by Isaac Asimov.

I tried that one on a trivia-loving acquaintance named Mike Barrett, and
he suggested that there should be several cities in China beginning with X
that are larger than Xenia ... since China CHANGED THE SPELLING of many
places.  Sure enough, he was right.  So that puzzle bites the dust.
Sorry, Mitch.

I was curious enough to run through an appendix in The New International Atlas
and construct a version of the complete list of 26.  For each city I used the
usual Anglicized form if one exists and was given in the atlas, otherwise the
transliterated form given in the atlas.

I preferred metropolitan area populations to city-proper populations where
the city was the center of a metropolitan area.  Rand McNally, the publishers
of the atlas, use their own definition of metropolitan area, so as to be
consistent from one country to another.  But the dates of the population
figures vary from 1980 for the USA back to 1971, and 1958 for China; so
there are likely a number of wrong entries.  I did it quickly, too, and
may have simply made errors.

(Notice that New York is NOT the only city in the USA on my list;
but I could easily believe that another list using different criteria would
make it the only one.  There are many fairly close decisions.)

Alexandria 		 2,700,000
Buenos Aires		 9,300,000
Calcutta		 9,100,000
Detroit			 4,635,000
East Berlin		 1,118,142
Frankfurt am Main	 1,865,000
Guadalajara		 2,150,000
Ho Chi Minh City	 2,750,000
Istanbul		 3,700,000
Jakarta			 4,900,000
Karachi			 4,500,000
London			11,065,000
Mexico City		12,450,000
New York		16,625,000
Osaka			15,000,000
Paris			 9,350,000
Qingdao			 1,144,000
Rio de Janeiro		 8,235,000
Shanghai		10,820,000
Tokyo			25,200,000
Ufa			   980,000
Victoria		 3,975,000
Washington		 3,185,000
Xi'an			 1,368,000
Yokohama		 2,729,433
Zibo*			   875,000

	*Population includes some surrounding rural land.

I was going to include the countries on the list, but perhaps some
of them are not so obvious, and I leave them as a puzzle.  I will
post the list again, with countries, in another message next week.
I'll also include the dates of the data, which I omit this time only
because places in the same country tend to have data of the same date.

Also, which city that is on the list is also counted as part of the
metropolitan area of another city on the list?  This, too, will be
answered in the followup.

Mark Brader