Nov 13 - Giant Soup Can

First I measured a Campbell's soup can. I got:

6.5cm diameter = can_diam

10cm length = can_length

Average bike height up to the saddle is 95cm (my bike).

From the picture it seems like the bike is 3 times smaller than the tank.

Therefore, the tank is 95*3=285cm tall. This would be the length of its diameter.

Let Diam_tank=285cm.

Since the tank has the same proportions as the can, we must find the scale factor.

Scale_factor = Diam_tank/can_diam =285/6.5=43.8 times.

Therefore let tank_length be the length of the tank.

We have tank_length=can_length*scale_factor=10cm*43.8=438cm.

Next to find the volume, we need to find the volume of a cylinder with the specified dimensions.

In this case, the volume of the tank = pi * r^2 * tank_length = 3.1415*1.425^2*4.38= 27.9 m^3

Google gives: Firefighters, on average, use nearly 3,000 gallons of water on a house fire. (Source: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/home-safety/21018283/what-really-happens-in-a-house-fire)  

This converts to 11.36 m^3 per house. So we can actually put out 3 burning houses!

 

I've chosen part (a) extending the puzzle.

In the Campbell Soup puzzle above we went from a small scale to a big scale. Now, we will go from a real life scale to a smaller scale. Look up the distance of all the planets in our solar system (including the sun) relative to the Earth and draw on an A4 paper an accurate scale of the solar system.