This has a lot of scary words and numbers in it, but it's all just fluff. That big ugly formula is nothing but numbers, except for the 'h' in it near the end. When you write your altitude in place of 'h' and push all the numbers through your calculator, the answer is the air pressure at that altitude.
All it's asking you to do is this:
-- Write ' 100 ' into the big formula.
-- Run all the numbers through the calculator and get the pressure at 100 meters.
-- Then write ' 1000 ' into the formula.
-- Run the whole thing through the calculator again, and see what the pressure is at 1,000 meters.
-- Subtract, and see how much the pressure changed between 100 meters and 1,000 meters.
You want to know what I think the whole idea is here ? I think the whole idea is to get you to decide which things to do first as you calculate the formula, AND to give you practice in using your calculator to do weird stuff.
In the formula, I see a power, a set of parentheses, two multiplications, and one subtraction. You have to decide what order to do them in. And THEN, you have to figure out how to do them all with your calculator.
Here's the order:
-- Inside the parentheses, multiply 2.25577x 10⁻⁵ by 'h' . -- Inside the parentheses, subtract the result from ' 1 '. -- Take the number inside the parentheses, and raise it to the 5.25588 power. -- Then multiply the result by 101,325 .
For 100 meters altitude, the pressure you should get is 100,129 pascals.
Make sure you can get that with your calculator when you put '100' in place of 'h'. And then, when THAT works, do it with 1,000 in place of 'h'.
The number you get for 1,000 meters should be about 10,254 pascals less.
