By Layla Roy and Karlie Shatoff
Are there more doors or wheels in the world? This seemingly arbitrary question sparked a heated debate on TikTok earlier in March. Users avidly chose sides, sharing their opinions on the topic. #TeamDoors has thus far received over 55 million views on the app, but #TeamWheels takes the lead with a massive 137 million views. Whether the world has more doors or wheels may remain forever unknown, but students at Nyack still have their own thoughts to contribute to the debate.
Junior Talia Reiss believes, “There are definitely more doors. I’ve gotten a lot of slander for this theory, but I believe almost every window that opens is a door. By definition, a door is ‘a hinged, sliding, or revolving barrier at the entrance to a building, room, or vehicle.’ Take a sliding glass door and a car window, for example: Both are sliding pieces of glass that form a barrier between two spaces. You can pass objects (or people, if you’re feeling ambitious) between the spaces. With that in mind, a standard car has ten doors (four regular doors, four regular windows, one trunk, and one sunroof) and only four wheels. By the same logic, a school bus has around 30 doors and, again, only four wheels. Doors + windows > wheels!!!”
Freshman Noa Daly shares, “I think there are more houses and buildings than there are cars. In each house, there are a bunch of doors and on a car, there are only four wheels.”
Junior Jaydon Shatoff states, “I definitely think there are more wheels from just what I have seen in everyday life. I have given it some thought and I feel like wheels are in almost everything around us. Although there are a lot of doors or windows, there are still definitely more wheels than doors.”
Some of Nyack’s students believe doors comprise lockers, cabinets, microwaves, and even windows. However, others have suggested that gears can be considered wheels as well. So, the debate persists. For reference, Merriam Webster defines a wheel as “a circular frame of hard material that may be solid, partly solid, or spoked and that is capable of turning on an axle,” and a door as “a usually swinging or sliding barrier by which an entry is closed and opened.”
Based on a poll posted to the Nyack Spectrum Instagram, a majority of 63% of students are team wheels!