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How can two streets both claim to be the steepest?

“Steepest” sounds like a single measurement until you ask where and over what distance it was taken. A curved street can have different gradients along different paths. Guinness World Records’ 2020 review of two contenders makes the problem concrete: a comparison needs a shared measuring convention, not just two impressive-looking numbers.

3–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • How does rise divided by horizontal run differ from an angle in degrees?
  • What changes when you compare the steepest short segment instead of an average for the whole street?

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Maths and statistics

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