The following activity was presented in the "Tiny Matter" Ask-a-Biologist
Podcast. These are the steps we took to see how big a one inch line would become
if it were to be magnified one hundred thousand times and then a billion times.
After you follow the activity, try out your math skills with an activity we have
outlined at the end.
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| It is difficult to
think about tiny things we cannot see. Let's take something we can see
and magnify it several times to see the results.
Grab a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler. Next
draw a line one inch long. |
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Using our
imagination and some mathematics we are going to magnify the line
100,000 times.
You can see from the use of multiplication, that
we have a line that is 100,000 inches long. |
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| How long is 100,000
inches?
First let's see how many feet 100,000 inches is by
dividing 100,000 by 12 (the number of inches in a foot).
The results of our calculation shows that the line
is 8,333 feet long.
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To help understand
just how long 8,333 feet is we can divide the total number of feet by
the number of feet in a mile (5280). Now we
can see the one inch line we just drew is now over 1 1/2 miles long! |
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| So far the length
of the magnified line has been calculated. How about the width of the
line? Depending on the size of the tip of your pencil, the width will
vary. The line we drew was 1/36 of an inch wide.
If we divide the length of the magnified line by
36 we will know the width of the line. |
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| Really, how big is this line? |
All these
calculations gives us an idea of how large the line can get when we
magnifying it 100,000 times, but it still does not give an idea of how
really large the line is. So we measured the
length and width of a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle to see how many we
could place on the magnified line. |
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| If we could line up all the bright
yellow Volkswagen Beetle cars on the line end-to-end the length of the
line, we would need 625 of the cars. If we
could place all the bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle cars side-by-side
across the width of the line, we would need 46 of the cars. |
How many cars could we line up
end-to-end and across the magnified line? |
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What would happen
if we magnified the
line a billion times?
Click to find out |
