Monday, October 28, 2013

How many hours would it take an inchworm to eat all the rows of spinach at the farm?


 My Fermi problem is : How many hours would it take an inchworm to eat all the rows o spinach at a farm? I got this Fermi problem from my Fermi mad libs and revised the idea to make it work better.  And I liked this one, for a few reasons. The first is that it made sense and wasn’t totally random. Inchworms actually eat spinach, but if I used cupcakes instead or something then it wouldn’t be a very realistic nor fair problem.  Also because it was creative and interesting. And lastly because it was testable but not easily knowable. ​
My questions are:​
1. What is the average eating rate of an inchworm (minutes)? 
​2. Does an inchworm eat constantly or does it take breaks?
​3. Does an inchworm like certain salad leaves more than others, making it eat them faster?

a. I learned that inchworms have really big appetites and spend all their time eating, which answers question 2. I also learned that they eat all different types of leaves so question 3 is answered. But didn’t find any information on the average eating rate, which is important.  I found all this information on ask.com. 
​b. Some information that is from my estimations is that it takes the inchworm  45 minutes to eat one leaf. And I figured this out based on some of the information I found in #3.There are about 15 leaves per spinach plant.  There are 100 plants per row, and there are 20 rows. The size of the spinach farm I didn’t have to look up, I just thought that it would be an appropriate size to try and figure the problem in. 
​To figure out how many hours it will take the inchworm to eat the whole spinach farm, you first have to figure out how big the spinach farm is. There are 20 rows with 100 spinach plants in each row. 
There are about 15 leaves on each plant. And it takes the inchworm 45 minutes to eat 1 leaf. 

So first you want to figure out how many plants total there are. 100 plants * 20 rows = 2000 spinach 
plants. Then you want to figure out the total number of leaves collected from every single plant. 15 
leaves per plant * 2000 plants = 30000 leaves total. Then to figure out how many hours it would take 
the inchworm to eat it all you would divide 30000 leaves by 45 minutes and you would get 2000 minutes. Then to convert that into hours you would divide 20000 minutes by 60 minutes to equal 333 hours.
​My calculations:
100 plants * 20 rows = 2000 spinach plants  15 leaves/1 plant * 2000 plants = 30000 leaves
3 * 10 ^4 leaves divided by 45 minutes = 20000 minutes   20000 minutes divided by 60 = 333 hours
30000 leaves total, in scientific notation the is 3*10^4 leaves.

​My Fermi problem: How many hours would it take an inchworm to eat all the rows of spinach at the farm? My answer: It would take the inchworm about 333 hours of nonstop eating to eat all the spinach on the farm. In other words that about 14 days. 







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