Math and Magic in Wonderland by Lilac Mohr

Author:Lilac Mohr [Mohr, Lilac]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2016-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

MATH

MATE

GATE

GAME

“That was easy!” Lulu exclaimed. When the girls looked up from the book, a ladder was propped against the trunk of the Tumtum tree.

“It's not very tall,” Lulu sighed. She tried to hide her disappointment. The ladder was no taller than she.

“You go,” said Elizabeth, who was about as fond of heights as swimming.

Lulu ascended the small ladder. She stretched out one arm while clutching onto the ladder with the other. Only one cluster of Tumtums was within reach. She plucked it and handed it over to her sister.

“Eight,” said Elizabeth. “There are eight Tumtums in this cluster.”

“Every cluster has eight pieces of fruit, of course,” corrected Pepper Pig. “You don't have to count.”

Elizabeth grabbed her calculator and divided 256 by 8. “We need 32 clusters,” she announced, “31 more to go.”

Lulu frowned. The ladder was simply too short to be of any use. “But how do we get a taller ladder? Where can we find the materials?” she wondered aloud.

“Language is worth a thousand pounds a word,”1 Pepper quoted.

“That's it! Words are a valuable resource around here. What we need is a new word ladder!” yelled out Elizabeth. “Each word is a rung. We made a ladder out of four words, so we received a ladder with four rungs.”

“But how many rungs do we need?” asked Lulu, “We can't figure out how tall the ladder needs to be without knowing the height of the tree. And we can't measure the height of the tree without a ladder. Sounds like a Catch-22 to me.”

“A what?” Elizabeth began. Just then, she spotted her shadow. An idea popped into her brain. “Thales has the answer,” she shouted.

“Thales?” asked Lulu and Pepper at the same time.

“Yes, he was a mathematician who calculated the height of the Great Pyramid by measuring its shadow,” explained Elizabeth. “We can use the same technique to figure out the height of the tree. Stand here, Lulu, and I'll measure your shadow first.”

Lulu stepped off the ladder and stood still while Elizabeth placed her bag on the ground and retrieved the ruler. The ruler was a foot long (12 inches). Elizabeth placed it against her sister's shoe and then made a mark in the dirt at the ruler's end. She moved the ruler and continued making marks in the dirt until she'd reached the end of Lulu's shadow.

“Your shadow is six feet long,” she declared.

“That's good to know,” said Lulu, “but what does it have to do with the height of the tree?”

“How tall are you?” Elizabeth asked her sister.

“Exactly four feet tall,” Lulu began, “I’m petite, but-”

“So your shadow is one and a half times your height,” Elizabeth interrupted. “How convenient!”

Lulu verified the figure in her head. Half of four is two. Add that to four and you get six. When she looked up, Elizabeth was already busy measuring the tree's shadow. She sketched a picture of the problem on a piece of paper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.