Words to know before you read
- Meter- a unit of measure. A meter is equal to100 centimeters or
39.37 inches.
- Millimeter- a unit of measure. One thousandth the size
of a meter.
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This is a continuation
of the scale activity |
Now that we know how large a one inch line becomes when we magnify it one
hundred thousand times (100,000 X), what would happen if we magnify the same line a
billion times (1,000,000,000 X)?
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| Back to our one
inch line that we drew with our pencil and ruler. |
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What would happen if we
magnified it a billion times? Notice that a billion has four more zeros
than when we wrote one hundred thousand (100,000). |
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| To see how many
feet we now have we need to divide our billion inches by 12. |
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Now that we have the number of feet let's get see if
we can calculate the number of miles by dividing it the number of feet
in a mile (5280). |
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| For the width we
will divide the total length by 36 since the width of the original line
is 1/36 of the length. |
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| If we took our carpet do you think
you could cover your entire city? Maybe you could cover the whole state
of Texas. Could you possibly have enough carpet to cover one or all of
the five continents below? |
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After doing some research on Wikipedia, the following
land surface areas were found. Which of the following continents could
you carpet with the least amount of carpet left over? Could you carpet
two of the continents below? If you could, which ones could you cover? |
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| Continent |
Area (miles²) |
Area (kilometers²)
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| Africa |
11,725,922 |
30,370,000 |
| Australia |
2,934,376 |
7,600,000 |
| Europe |
3,930,520 |
10,180,000 |
| North America |
9,455,642 |
24,490,000 |
| South America |
6,888,062 |
17,840,000 |
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Here is an activity for you.
If you have followed the two mathematic activities it becomes clear that
changing the size of things can have a very big impact. However, the biggest
impact is still to be calculated. If the nano world is actually one billion
times smaller than a meter, to get an idea of the reverse you need to calculate
the size of a one meter line magnified one billion times.
Take a line one meter long by one millimeter wide and calculate the magnified
size if we magnify it one billion times and answer these questions.
How many times could the line go back a forth between the Earth and the Moon?
How many Earths could you cover with the magnified line if were carpet?
Send us your answers and we will will let you know how well you have done. |
