Hey all, and welcome to another post on Math by Edison. Today we do some ice skating and some math.
I went skating ⛸ on the ice oval (500m Olympic size ice oval)
around 7:00am this morning. It was cold! Negative 17 degrees Celsius cold ⛸! And with a 10 km/hr wind, the wind chill was negative 23 degrees Celsius … but those freezing temperatures got me thinking …. thinking about math …
If you open your eyes, look around, math is everywhere, and it was everywhere on my mind during my morning skate:
Gr 6-12, Rate questions
One lap of the 500 m oval took me about 90 seconds.
a) What was my rate for that one lap?
b) What was my unit rate?
c) If I skated at that rate for 40 minutes how many meters would I skate?
d) If I skated 12,500 m how long would that take?
Challenge questions:
e) What was my rate in km/hr?
f) If the temperature was increasing at a rate of 1 degrees Celsius/hour, what would the temperature be at 11:30am?
Gr 6-12, Ratio & Fraction questions:
For each lap I skated, the time ratio of skating backwards to total time was about 5 secs to 90 seconds
a) If I skated a total of 40 minutes, how many seconds would I have skated backwards? Sneaky question, but if you make a mistake, you’ll know. How? Your answer won’t make sense.
b) What fraction of each lap was I skating backwards to the total time?
c) Simplify your answer - Tip: your buddy on this will be the Greatest Common Factor (GCF)
d) If I skated backwards for 100 seconds how much time did I spend skating in total (equivalent fractions here I come)?
Gr 6-12, Mean, Median, Mode questions
My five best times to skate one lap in seconds were 75, 80, 79, 77, 75. What was my a) Mean time?
b) Median time?
c) Mode?
d) Which graph would be best to use to graph this data - bar graph, circle graph, line graph or a histogram?
Okay, those were the warm-up questions. Let’s make it a bit more ‘interesting’:
Gr 6-12 Percent question
On my 24th lap it took me 90 seconds. If the 25th lap was 5% slower than the 24th lap, how long did it take me to skate that 25th lap?
Gr 6-12, Probability question that will make you cringe, then smile 😁
The world record for the 500m in speed skating is about 34 seconds (that’s crazy fast),
a) If my best skating time for the 500m today was 75 seconds, how much faster would I have to skate to tie that world record?
b) What’s the probability I could tie that world record by next week? (and if you said ‘zero’ quickly, hold your horses there’s another part of the question 😊).
c) If I was skating on a straight 500m track with a wind at my back (behind me … pushing me - a hurricane type wind …) what would the wind’s speed need to be for me to break that world record?
Okay class is over for today.
Re-cap: Math is everywhere … you just need to look for it. Then when you find it … ask it a few questions.’ Like, hey math howz it going … I have a question for you?
Gotta love the cold math,
Edison
P.S. That ‘Gr 6 - 12’ means these questions could come up in any of those grades
