1 Horses are to race over a certain English meadow for a 5 Hydraulic engineers in the United States often use,

States often use, as a unit of

distance of 4.0 furlongs.
(a) What is the race distance in rods?
(b) What is the race distance in chains?
(1 furlong = 201.168 m, 1 rod = 5.0292 m, and 1 chain =
20.117 m.)
volume of water, the acre-foot, defined as the volume of water
that will cover 1 acre of land to a depth of 1 ft. A severe
thunderstorm dumped 2.0 in. of rain in 30 min on a town of
area 26 km2. What volume of water, in acre-feet, fell on the
town?

Answer Answer
(a) 160 rods; 1.1 x 103 acre-feet
(b) 40 chains

6 Earth is approximately a sphere of radius 6.37 x 106 m.

2 The micrometer (1 µm) is often called the micron.
(a) How many microns make up 1.0 km?
(b) What fraction of a centimeter equals 1.0 µm?
(c) How many microns are in 1.0 yd?
(a) What is its circumference in kilometers?
(b) What is its surface area in square kilometers?
(c) What is its volume in cubic kilometers?

Answer
Answer (a) 4.00 x 104 km;
(b) 5.10 x 108 km2;
(a) 109 µm; (c) 1.08 x 1012 km3
(b) 10-4 cm
(c) 9.1 x 105 µm
7 If someone told you that every dimension of every object had
shrunk to half its former value overnight, how could you refute
3 Harvard Bridge, which connects MIT with its fraternities this statement?
across the Charles River, has a length of 364.4 Smoots plus
one ear. The unit of one Smoot is based on the length of Oliver
Reed Smoot, Jr., class of 1962, who was carried or dragged Answer
length by length across the bridge so that other pledge
members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity could mark off By the very nature the standard is also cut in half so
(with paint) 1 Smoot lengths along the bridge. The marks have nothing will appear to change.
been repainted biannually by fraternity pledges since the initial
measurement, usually during times of traffic congestion so that
the police cannot easily interfere. (Presumably, the police were 8 You could define "one second" to be one pulse beat of the
originally upset because the Smoot is not an SI base unit, but current president of the American Physical Society. Galileo
these days they seem to have accepted the unit.) The figure used his pulse as a timing device in some of his work. Why is
shows three parallel paths, measured in Smoots (S), Willies a definition based on the atomic clock better?
(W), and Zeldas (Z).
(a) What is the length of 50.0 Smoots in Willies?
(b) What is the length of 50.0 Smoots in Zeldas? Answer

The pulse is not invariant. It changes with persons it also

changes with individual activity. Measurement with pulse
beats may also change while an experiment is in process.

9 Write the following as full (decimal) numbers with standard

units:
(a) 35.6 mm
(b) 25 microvolts
Answer (c) 250 mg
(d) 500 picoseconds
(a) 60.8W; (e) 2.5 femtometers
(b) 43.3Z (f) 25 gigavolts

Answer
4 Antarctica is roughly semicircular, with a radius of 2000 km
(See figure). The average thickness of its ice cover is 3000 m.
(a) 3.56 x 10-2 m
How many cubic centimeters of ice does Antarctica contain?
(Ignore the curvature of Earth.) (b) 2.5 x 10-5 V
(c) 2.5 x 104 lg
(d) 5.00 x 10-10sec
(e) 2.5 x 10-15 m
(f) 2.5 x 1010 V

Answer

1.9 x 1022 cm3

10 For about 10 years after the French Revolution, the French
government attempted to base measures of time on multiples of
ten: One week consisted of 10 days, one day consisted of 10
hours, one hour consisted of 100 minutes, and one minute
consisted of 100 seconds.
(a) What is the ratio of the French decimal week to the
standard week?
(b) What is the ratio of the French decimal second to the
standard second?
14 The cran is a British volume unit for freshly caught herrings: 1
cran ~ 170.474 liters (L) of fish, about 750 herrings. Suppose
that, to be cleared through customs in Saudia Arabia, a
shipment of 1255 crans must be declared in terms of cubic
covidos, where the covido is an Arabic unit of length: I covido
= 48.26 cm. What is the required declaration?
Answer

Answer 1.903 x 103 cubic Covidos

(a) 1.43
(b) 1.157 15 Use Si prefexes to express
(a) 106 phones
(b) 10-6 phone
11 Three digital clocks A, B, and C run at different rates and do (c) 101 cards
not have simultaneous readings of zero. The figure shows (d) 109 lows
simultaneous readings on pairs of the clocks for four occasions. (e) 1012 bulls
(At the earliest occasion, for example, B reads 25.0 s and C (f) 10-1 mate
reads 92.0 s.) Two events are 600 s apart on clock A.
(g) 10-2 ped
(a) How far apart are they on clock B?
(b) How far apart are they on clock C? (h) 10-9 Nannette
(c) When clock A reads 400 s, what does clock B read? (i) 10-12 boo
(d) When clock C reads 15.0 s, what does clock B read? (j) 10-18 boy
(Assume negative readings for prezero times.) (k) 2 x 102 withits
(l) 2 x 103 mockingbirds
Now that you have the idea, invent a few similar expressions.
(See , in this connection, p. 61 of A Random Walk in Science,
compiled by R. L. Weber; Crane, Russak & Co., New York,
1974)

Answer

(a) Megaphone
(b) Microphone
Answer (c) Deka cards
Deck of Cards
(a) 495 s; (d) gigalow
(b) 141 s; gigalow
(c) 198 s; (e) Tera bull
(d) -245 s Terrible
(f) decimate
(g) centapede
Assuming that the length of the day uniformly increases by (h) nano Nannette
12 No No Nannette
0.001 s in a century, calculate the cumulative effect on the
measurement of time over 20 centuries. Such a slowing down (i) Picoboo
of the earth's rotation is indicated by observation of the Peek-a-boo
occurrences of solar eclipses during this period. (j) atto boy
at-a-boy
(k) two hectowithits
Answer to- heck-with-it
(l) twokilomockingbirds
2.03 hours to kill a mockingbird

13 On a spending spree in Malaysia, you buy an ox with a weight
of 28.9 piculs in the local unit of weights: 1 picul = 100 gins, 1
gin = 16 tahils, 1 tahil = 10 chees, and 1 chee = 10 hoons. The
weight of 1 hoon corresponds to a mass of 0.3779 g. When you
arrange to ship the ox home to your astonished family, how
much mass in kilograms must you declare on the shipping
manifest?
16 A gry is an old English measure for length, defined as 1/10 of a
line, where line is another old English measure for length,
defined as 1/12 inch. A common measure for length in the
publishing business is a point, defined as 1/72 inch. What is an
area of 0.50 gry2 in points squared (points2)?

Answer
Answer
0.18 points
1.75 x 103 kg

17 What is your height in meters?

Answer

variable
18 An old English children's rhyme states, "Little Miss Muffet sat
on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey, when along came a
spider who sat down beside her . . . ... The spider sat down not
because of the curds and whey but because Miss Muffet had a
stash of 11 tuffets of dried flies. The volume measure of a
tuffet is given by 1 tuffet = 2 pecks = 0.50 Imperial bushel,
where 1 Imperial bushel = 36.3687 liters (L).
(a) What was Miss Muffet's stash in pecks?
(b) What was Miss Muffet's stash in Imperial bushels?
(c) What was Miss Muffet's stash in liters?
Answer
(a) 22 pecks;
(b) 5.5 Imperial
bushels;
(c) 200 L
19 In the United States, a doll house has the scale of 1:12 of
a real house (that is, each length of the doll house is 1/12 that
of the real house) and a miniature house (a doll house to fit
within a doll house) has the scale of 1:144 of a real house.
Suppose a real house (figure) has a front length of 20 m, a
depth of 12 m, a height of 6.0 m, and a standard sloped roof
(vertical triangular faces on the ends) of height 3.0 m.
(a) What is the volume of the house?
(b) In cubic meters, what are the volumes of the corresponding
doll house?
(c) In cubic meters, what are the volumes of the corresponding
miniature house?
Answer
(a) 1800 m3
(b) 1.04 m3;
(c) 6.028 x 10-4 m3
20 Computer chips are etched on circular silicon wafers of
thickness 0.60 mm that are sliced from a solid cylindrical
silicon crystal of length 30 cm. If each wafer can hold 100
chips, what is the maximum number of chips that can be
produced from one entire cylinder?
Answer
50,000 chips/cylinder
21 The research submersible ALVIN is diving at a speed of 36.5
fathoms per minute.
(a) Express this speed in meters per second. A fathom (fath) is
precisely 6 ft.
(b) What is this speed in miles per hour?
(c) What is this speed in light-years per year?
Answer
(a) 1.11 m/s
(b) 2.49 mi/hr
(c) 3.71 x 10-9 ly/yr
22 You receive orders to sail due east for 24.5 mi to put your
salvage ship directly over a sunken pirate ship. However, when
your divers probe the ocean floor at that location and find no
evidence of a ship, you radio back to your source of
information, only to discover that the sailing distance was
supposed to be 24.5 nautical miles, not regular miles. Use the
Length table in Appendix D to calculate how far horizontally
you are from the pirate ship in kilometers.
Answer
5.95 km
23 A unit of area often used in measuring land areas is the hectare,
defined as 104 m2. An open-pit coal mine consumes 75 hectares
of land, down to a depth of 26 m, each year. What volume of
earth, in cubic kilometers, is removed in this time?
Answer
0.0195 km3
24 Grains of fine California beach sand are approximately spheres
with an average radius of 50 µm and are made of silicon
dioxide. A solid cube of silicon dioxide with a volume of 1.00
m3 has a mass of 2600 kg.
(a) What is the surface area of a grain of sand?
(b) What is the surface area of the cube?
(c) What is the density of the cube?’
(d) What is the volume of a grain of sand?’
(e) What is the mass of a single grain of sand
(f) What is the number of grains of sand in the cube?
(g) What mass of sand grains would have a total surface area
(the total area of all the individual spheres) equal to the surface
area of a cube 1.00 m on an edge?
Answer
(a) 3.14 x 10-8m2
(b) 6 m2
(c) 2600 kg/m3
(d) 5.23 x 10-13m3
(e) 1.36 x 10-9 kg
(f) 1.91 x 108 grains
(g) 0.260 kg that make the surface area of the cube.
25 The cubit is an ancient unit of length based on the distance 29 Make a rough estimate of the volume of your body (in cm3).
between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger of the (Note: This type of problem is a Fermi problem where you
measurer. Assume that the distance ranged from 43 to 53 cm, have to use common sense to make a set of assumptions).
and suppose that ancient drawings indicate that a cylindrical Assumptions:
pillar was to have a length of 9 cubits and a diameter of 2 (a) What shape does your body have?
cubits. (b) What is the voume of your body based on your assumed
(a) For the stated range, what is the lower value and the upper shape?
value, respectively, for the cylinder's length in meters?
(b) For the stated range, what is the lower value and the upper
value, respectively, for the cylinder's length in millimeters? Answer
(c) For the stated range, what is the lower value and the upper
value, respectively, for the cylinder's volume in cubic meters? 8 x 103 cm3

30 Estimate the number of car mechanics in your town or city.

Answer (Note: This type of problem is a Fermi problem where you
have to use common sense to make a set of assumptions).
(a) 3.9 m, Assumptions:
4.8 m; (a) How many people are in Livonai?
(b) 3.9 x 103 mm, (b) How many people are there per car?
4.8 x 103 mm; (c) How many times do you service your car?
(c) 2.2 m3, (d) How long does the survice take?
4.2 m3 (e) How long does a single mechanic work per day, per week?

What is the number of mechanics in Livonia?

26 Estimate how long it would take a good runner to run across
the United States from New York to California. (Note: This
type of problem is a Fermi problem where you have to use Answer
common sense to make a set of assumptions).
Assumptions: (a) 90,000 people
(a) Approximately how long is the route (b) Assume 2 residents per car
(b) How long do you expect to run each day? (c) 2 hours
(c) What is your average running speed? (d) 3 times a year
(e) 8 hrs/day 5 days/wk
Use these assumptions to answer the basic question.
130 mechanics

Answer
31 Estimate how long it would take one person to mow a high
(a) 3000 miles school football field using an ordinary home lawnmower.
(b) 5 hrs/day (Note: This type of problem is a Fermi problem where you
5 days/ week have to use common sense to make a set of assumptions).
(c) 5 miles/hour Assumptions:
(a) width of the field
24 weeks total (b) length of the field
(c) width of lawnmower (assume 24’’)
(d) walking speed.
27 Estimate the thickness of a page of this book.
(a) explain how you could accurately and easily deterimine the Answer the fundamental question.
thickness of a single page of your text book.
(b) Calculate the thickness of a single page of the book.
Answer

Answer (a) 160 ft

(b) 360 ft
(a) measure the thickness of the pages (c) 21 inches
(d) 3 miles/hr
count the umber of pages. Remember if you use the page about 1.75 hours
numbers remember to divide the number by 2

Thickness/# of pages

(b) answers will vary

28 Estimate the number of times a human heart beats in a lifetime.

(Note: This type of problem is a Fermi problem where you
have to use common sense to make a set of assumptions).
Assumptions:
(a) What is the average heart beat per minute
(b) How long do you expect to live?

Anser the fundamental question.

Answer

(a) approximately 60/beats a minute

(b) 85 years

2.68 x 109 beats