California
National Math Trail Submissions
The lake is gigantic for a manmade lake - 124 acres. You'd walk 3.8
miles if you followed the shoreline all around it. It holds almost
2 billion gallons of water. There was a big controversy when they
first built it because they had to haul in water from other places
to fill the lake, but there is an underground aquifer that pumps
water into the lake from a well, and even here in sunny California,
we do get some rain - an average of almost 17 inches a year.
Math Problem:
Here's a chart of Lake Mission Viejo's Vital Statistics. Fill in the blanks:
Solving the Problem:
I looked in the dictionary for a table of weights
and measures. Then I filled in the blanks by
multiplying or dividing. Hint: You might not
find a fathom on the chart, but it's equal to six feet.
Math Topic and Grade Level: Conversions
Grade: 7
Standards Correlation:
(From California Math Standards)
Students choose appropriate units of measure
and use ratios to convert within and between
measurement systems to solve problems.
1.1 compare weights, capacities, geometric
measures, times and temperatures within and
between measurement systems (e.g., miles per
hour and feet per second, cubic inches to
cubic centimeters)
This is what it looked like when they first dug out the hole for the lake.
Here it is when they first filled it.
25 years ago there were mostly cattle. Now there
are almost 100,000 people living in Mission Viejo.
This is one of the developer's original drawings.
Max. Depth
11.66 fathoms
****** feet
21,336 meters
Area
****** acres
5,427,576 sq. ft.
500,543 sq. meters
Volume
3,800 acre-feet
****** cu. yards
1,187,646,705 gallons
On Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California they are building
a MEGA MALL complex. In typical Tinseltown style, they're designing
it to look like a movie set - a kind of modern version of ancient Egypt,
complete with gigantic elephant statues.
With all the tourists coming to Hollywood looking for movie stars, the streets are incredibly busy. I was wondering how much more traffic is this mall going to create? How are they going to handle all those cars? I talked to the Traffic Engineer whose job it was to figure out the answers to these questions. We talked about the traffic connected to the new movie theater, which will have 4,000 seats!
For the movie theatre, the Institute of Transportation Engineers did a
survey and found that 1.25 car trips will be generated per seat in the
theater every day. 4000 seats x 1.25 trips = 5000 car trips per day.
That means that for the movie theatre alone there will be 5000 cars
parking in a day. When you start adding the cars going to all the stores
and restaurants and the hotel and health club. Now THAT is a lot of cars!
Here's a mathematics problem for you:
MEGA MALL under construction.
A hotel in a mall, what a killer place to stay!!!!!
Hollywood Blvd in Hollywood, CA.
The Guinness Museum on Hollywood Blvd.
Math topics:
Charting
Estimation
Scale
Grade level:
5-8
Your rich uncle decides that you are his favorite nephew (or niece) and sends you to Hollywood to open up another store in his chain of discount kitchenware outlets, The Lucky Cook. You decide to add your own touch by including a music section devoted to London Underground Techno and a few electronic games, like Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 for the younger set. The MEGA MALL leasing agent wants to know how much square footage you will need for your store and many cars you expect at various times during the day. The mall is open from 9 AM to 10 PM seven days a week.
1) Draw a layout of your store, including the music and game sections, to scale and then figure out how many square feet you will need.
2) Make a daily traffic schedule for the parking engineers by estimating how many cars you expect at various times during the day and during the week. (Hint - weekends might be heavier, late afternoons might have more kids coming after school).
Be optimistic! Your uncle says your next store can be in Hawaii!
Back to California menu