Q. Like many first-year M.B.A. students, I am preparing to interview for summer internship positions. A typical interviewer may ask a question such as “How many windows are there in all the buildings in Manhattan?” to test your critical reasoning skills. There are ways to estimate, but I’d love to know for sure: Just how many buildings are there on the island of Manhattan, and how many windows do they contain?

A. Good news and bad news from the City Planning Department.

The good news is that there are approximate tallies: Manhattan has about 47,000 buildings of all kinds, give or take a hundred or two, depending on the reference source.

The bad news is that the department has no estimate of the number of windows and knows of no other source, noting that there is no such thing as an average Manhattan building.

Memorizing that 47,000 number may get you precisely nowhere with your prospective employer.

There are a surprisingly large number of Internet responses to the question “How many windows in Manhattan?” stimulated by a claim that it was really asked of job seekers by a prestigious consulting firm.