Students and Staff at J.L. Ilsley High School recently returned from a March break trip to Italy. Their stories about Rome and pizza and gelato inspired this "Would You Rather?" math question. Most students are pretty familiar with pizza and have strong opinions to share on their favourite type and restaurant for pizza. Would you rather have a slice of pizza from New York or from Rome? The New York pizza costs $2.75 US per slice. The Rome pizza costs 1,50€ per 100 grams. In Rome, pizza by the slice or "pizza al taglio" is typically sold in rectangular pieces by weight. Prices are often listed per 100 grams. Prices can vary greatly depending upon the type and location of restaurant. Restaurants close to major tourist attractions in Rome are often much more expensive. The price I quote above is from Pizza Florida in Rome. Estimating the weight of a typical slice of pizza might be difficult for students. How much does a typical piece of pizza weigh? According to Pizza Pizza, a 1/10 slice of a 14 inch diameter pizza is approximately 110 grams. There is also the issue of currency conversion. You could ask for 3 Euros worth of pizza, but how much will that cost you in Canadian dollars? An online currency conversion website or app can help with currency exchange. The Nova Scotia Mathematics 10 curriculum has outcomes on both currency exchange and SI to imperial unit measurement conversions so I thought this would be a nice warm up question to be used in that course. In case you were wondering where you should go to eat pizza, here are the 14 top cities for pizza, as identified on the Conde Nast Traveler Best Pizza in the World list. Note that a Canadian city, Edmonton, made the list.
Nova Scotia Mathematics Curriculum Outcomes
Mathematics 10 - M02 Students will be expected to apply proportional reasoning to problems that involve conversions between SI and imperial units of measure. Mathematics 10 - FM01 Students will be expected to solve problems that involve unit pricing and currency exchange, using proportional reasoning. Would you rather install and maintain an electric hand dryer or a paper towel dispenser in a public washroom?Public school students are familiar with public washrooms since every school has them. Does your school have paper towels or an electric hand dryer? Most public schools that I have been in have paper towel holders... why do you think that is? Cost of InstallationA hand dryer cost considerably more to purchase and install than a paper towel dispenser. A typical hand dryer costs in the range of $600 plus installing electric hookup. A good paper towel dispenser costs around $100 and only requires a few screws to install. Cost of OperationThe cost of operation can vary widely depending upon where the washroom is and how often it is used. A washroom in a big sports stadium, an airport or a large school will see a lot more visits than a small business. Electricity to run a hand dryer is quite a bit cheaper than purchasing paper towels. In Nova Scotia in 2015, the electricity rate is 14.947 cents per kilowatt-hour. To find the annual cost of operation of a hand dryer, multiply the dry time of the hand dryer (in hours) by the rated wattage of the hand dryer (kW) by the average number of uses per day by the number of days in a year by the electricity price per kWh. To find the cost of operating a paper towel dispenser, multiply the number of visits per day by the number of paper towels used per visit (about 2 probably) by the cost of each paper towel (about $0.01 on average). Dyson has a really great website on how they calculate costs for their Dyson Airblade electric hand dryer and compare the costs to traditional hand dryers and paper towels. Other Considerations
Would You Rather have the revenue from an amusement park Ferris wheel or carousel ride?I'm a big fan of questions based on the "Would You Rather?" prompt. This weekend, my son and I visited Atlantic Playland for the first time. We bought a book of tickets and started exploring some of the rides. Our favorites were the Ferris wheel and the Nostalgic Carousel. The Ferris wheel costs us 4 tickets per ride and the carousel cost us 3 tickets per ride. If you were an amusement park operator, which ride would you rather have? Why do you think these rides cost a different number of tickets? Both rides lasted about the same amount of time. The carousel holds more people and is much faster to load and unload. Operating a carousel does not take as much training as operating a Ferris wheel. There is a surprising amount of mental math and estimation require to operate a Ferris wheel. Loading and unloading a Ferris wheel takes a bit of time as the weight of the riders has to be balanced. The Ferris wheel appears to be a more popular ride however and often lots of riders while the carousel was never very full (the Ferris wheel can hold up to 24 people in 12, 2-person seats while the Ferris wheel can hold over 30 at a time).
What do you think? If you operated an amusement park, which ride would you want to have? Update: This question is now on the Would You Rather website! EL |
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