Question

You have been asked to build a scale model of your school out of toothpicks. imagine your school is 30 feet tall. your scale is 1 ft:1.26 cm. if a toothpick is 6.3 cm tall, how many toothpicks tall will your model be? the model will be 6 toothpicks tall. your mother is out of toothpicks, and suggests you use cotton swabs instead. you measure them, and they are 7.7 cm tall. how many cotton swabs tall will your model be? if necessary, round your answer to the nearest whole number

Answer 1

Since your scale is 1ft:1.26cm, a 30-ft tall school would need to have a $30*1.26=37.8$ cm model. Dividing this by how tall each toothpick is, you'll get:

$\frac{37.8}{6.3} =6$

ANSWER: The model would be 6 toothpicks tall.

To find out how many cotton swabs you'll need, we just divide 37.8 by how tall each swab is:

$\frac{37.8}{7.7} =5$

ANSWER: The model would be 5 cotton swabs tall.