Curtains

Ten years after moving into our house, we finally decided to trade the tired looking blinds in the living room and dining room for cozy curtains. First I went downtown to the fashion district, and purchased some lovely material. (see photo) Then, I did a lot of measuring of all the windows, and started sewing the curtains. Mr. Billett volunteered to pick out an order the curtain rods, rings and clips.
As he was looking for curtain rods online, he asked me how wide each panel was, so that he can figure out how many rings to get. The website we ordered from suggested four rings per foot. Unfortunately, I measured the curtains in centimeters, because I grew up in Hungary using the metric system, and feel more comfortable with it. When I told him the width of one panel was 230 cm, he had to do some math to figure out how many rings to order, keeping in mind that we will need two panels for one window. He did it, can you?

NASA Survey

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently released the results of a survey conducted among airline pilots. The release of the results was delayed because NASA officials thought the findings would scare airline passengers. Here are some of the numbers as reported by the Associated Press.

The survey showed:

• 1,266 incidents in which aircraft flew within 500 feet of each other (near miss)
• 1,312 cases where pilots suddenly dropped or climbed accidentally more than 300 feet in flight
• 166 reports of pilots landing without clearance (permission) at an airport

What is your interpretation of this data? Do you find it scary? Can you tell the true meaning of these numbers? What additional information would help make sense of the information?

The Real Mac Pro

On Sunday, December 23, Mr. Billett's 6-year-old G4 stopped working once and for all.

So the next day we went to the Apple store at the Glendale Galleria, and picked up a brand new Mac Pro to replace it. The Apple store was a lot of fun - we tried the iPhone, the new iPod nano, and got expert advice from Josh, a friendly sales associate. Lucky for us, Apple offers an educational discount. The regular price for the Mac Pro is $2499, but with the educators' discount, we paid $2299.

Your job is to figure out about what percentage was our savings. It may seem complicated at first, but proportions, our good old friends, will come to the rescue. Here's how:
Here is another hint to make your job easier: You can round the total price and the sale price to the nearest hundred.

Wedding Bells

On December 22 Mr. Billett and I attended a party to celebrate our friend Tom and Lisa's marriage. Tom and Lisa live in Switzerland, where she works for the World Health Organization as a nutritionist. We bought them a gift card for $100. Your job is to find out how much this gift is worth in Switzerland, in Swiss Francs. You can use Yahoo Finance to find the exchange rate.

Story Problems

(click the picture to enlarge)

Mr. Billett found this cartoon by Lynda Barry while he was reading the paper the other day. It makes fun of math word problems by exploring their "back-story", which is the history behind a situation. I thought it was relevant because we have been solving a lot of word problems involving proportions recently. (Click here to download the handouts under homework assignments for 12/17 and 12/12.)

To receive extra credit, you can make up a problem of your own, and come up with questions about the back-story like the girl in the cartoon. If you are working on this at school, you can use Comic Life to create an additional panel for the cartoon and email it to me.

If you choose to comment on this post, select a story problem we worked on in class, and make up some back-stroy questions for it. Have fun!