Math and Science.

So... Hey.

I haven't blogged in a while again... silly me. Life has been so busy lately! I'm trying though. So here I am sitting on the computer typing up a super cool blog that basically no one but Julia (haha) is going to read. Whatever. Here goes...

Last week/I think it was two weeks ago I talked about the Pythagorean Theorem that we are learning about in Math. Since then, we have basically just been practising using the theorem to solve word problems. Here is an example of a (simple) word problem:

Julia is making a birthday card for yours truly out of a piece of construction paper. The paper measured 30cm by 20cm. She decided to be unique and cut the paper in half and then staple the two pieces together. She decided to be even more unique and cut the paper in half along the diagonal, instead of right down the middle. How long would the diagonal cut be?

Well, first we need to draw a diagram.

->The image button works today! :)

Now I realize that it's a bad image, but just use your imagination.

Now, we list our givens and required.

a=20cm

b=30cm

c=?

And then the formula.

a2+b2 = c2 (<-once again, that means a squared plus b squared equals c squared)

Now, we solve.

(20cm)2+(30cm)2 = c2

400cm2+900cm2 = c2

1300cm2 = c2

square root of 1300cm2 = square root of c2

36.0555128cm = c

36.06 = c

The diagonal cut would be 36.06cm long.

It is all pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it.

In Science, we had our car race yesterday. And, I'm proud to announce, my group won! Our car was kept simple. Here is a diagram of what our car looked like:

We just had two gears, one master and one slave, so that no speed was lost due to friction. Our wheels were made out of Styrofoam balls, so they were all the same size and shape and they didn't wobble from side to side. And, our car was just the coolest in general. So it won. And you're jealous.

Well I'm going to go now...

Bye!

Until next... time...

-K