Thursday, September 25, 2008

Math Practice Problems #2



Today, I was asked this question:


"Titan and Rhea are the two largest moons of Saturn. The ratio of of the surface area of Titan to the surface area of Rhea is about 34:3. If the diameter of Rhea is about 1530km, what is the diameter of Titan?"


This one's pretty simple. We only need two formulae.


A=4πr2
d=2r


That's for the surface area of a sphere. Now we need to assign values.


ATitan=4πrTitan2
ARhea=4πrRhea2
dRhea=1530 km
ATitan=(34/3)ARhea


Now we can start figuring out the diameter of Titan


rRhea=1530km/2=765km
4πrTitan2=(34/3)4π(7652)


Since there's a on each side, we can eliminate it from both sides.


rTitan2=(34/3)(7652)


Next, we take the square root of both sides


rTitan=√((34/3)(7652))


Now we multiply both sides by 2.


dTitan=2·√((34/3)(7652))

dTitan=5150.74752


Finally, we need to round the answer until the number of digits we end with matches the number we started with, so the final answer is 5150 km.

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