Have you ever sat in math class, learning a new lesson, and wondered, "When the Pit am I ever gonna use this slag?" Alright, well, maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines. I know that I often do, especially being in Geometry. The questions 'prove it' and 'when are we gonna use this' have been used so often that it's more of a running joke than actual questions. And then there's the fandom I'm obsessed with… Wait for it…
Transformers!
So as we were reviewing "Chapter 7: Ratios," a thought struck. I had always wondered how tall Optimus Prime and the other bots were, so I could compare them to everyday things. So I immediately started jotting down all the measurements I knew that accompanied the bots. The list was short.
-hand is long enough to hold a human
So I started there. First, I knew that the average person is about 5 feet tall, or 60 inches. I also knew that the length of one's hand to one's height was proportional. So if my hand was 7 inches long, and I was 63 inches tall, then the ratio of my hand to my height was 7:63, or 1:9 if you wanted to simplify it. Then, you set up your proportion as 1/9=60/h, with h being the unknown height. Then you cross multiply to get 1×h=9×60. You simplify, and since 1×h is just h, you get h=9×60, or h=540 inches. But I didn't just stop there. I wanted to see how many feet tall he was, so I simply divided 540 by 12, since there are 12 inches in a foot, and got 45 feet. So Optimus Prime is roughly 45 feet tall, based on my speculations. And research on my part has shown that he is an average of 41 feet tall, since some people say 32, and others say 50, so the median would be 41. And I was just 4 feet off, which is really close for working with what I did.
From here, you could find any of the other bots' heights by finding out how many heads shorter than Optimus Prime they are, but that's a lesson for another time. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed Transforming Math!
Math Symbols:
× Multiplication
/ Division
h Variable for height