This last week, Cammi, myself, and Aaron set out to solve one of the biggest mysteries known to
One possible strategy was a tradition used by the Indians to try to find out how high trees were a long time ago. They found that if they walked away from the tree until they could see the top looking between their legs, they could measure the distance between where the stopped and the base of the tree, and it would usually equal the height of it. In our real life test of it, we found that this didn’t actually work very well for us.
Another way to do it was to tie a string to a protractor and tape a straw to it to find the “augument angle” and do some complicated calcutator work to get an estimate of the height of whatever it was you were measuring.
One last strategy we tried (and this one was the most intuitive and easiest) was using a two person team. One person(in our case, Cammi) would stand a great distance back so that the height of her own thumb would be the same as the height of the person they were trying to measure. Then, Cammi would turn her thumb exactly sideways and have Aaron stand where the end of her thumb would appear from her “mind’s eye”. From there, all I had to do was measure the distance between Aaron and Mr. Langdon, and we were able to find his height. Amazing! Math really can be useful in real life!
- Karl Kuszewski, Junior
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