This question itself wasn’t too difficult, but finding all the relevant information to solve this problem took most of my time. I first assumed Susan would use an xs size bike frame, but whenever I search up “women’s bike dimensions,” they only include the frame size and wheel size, but never the bike height or length. So it took quite a bit of digging to find the right info. After that, I used a ruler on my iPad to measure how many bikes tall and wide the tank is, and multiplied it to the bike’s dimension. So in the end, I found that the tank is 380cm wide and 185cm tall. From here, I just plugged all the numbers into the cylinder volume formula, and found that this tank occupies 10.2 m^3, which equates to 10,200 L. And lastly, an average house fire can require up to 11,300 L of water, so given some errors in my estimation, this tank should contain just enough water to put out an average house fire. Since firetrucks also carry some water, most house fires should be safely dealt with!
From a teacher’s point of view, this was a very fun question! The biggest issue I have with problems like those is how hard it is to find certain information online, like the height of the bike, not the bike frame. So questions like those focus more on research skills, rather than math skills. But, it does train estimation skills, which is probably one of the most useful skills that us math teacher can pass onto our students, since estimation is extremely practical!
EDIT: and now, for the extension part, I would love for the students to measure everything with a given object. Say something like a desk, they would measure the desk, and then they would take pictures of things in nature that they want to measure (ex. A tree). Then, they would have to estimate the measurement of that object based on the number of desks. So we can move the desk outside to the walls of the school, and measure how tall our school is in terms of desks. I think it would be fun for the students to apply this method of estimation to whatever they want to measure for fun.
Thanks Leon -- good solution! (I actually ride a medium-sized bike... even though I'm not tall, I'm at the average height for women in Canada...) Interesting reflections! But you haven't included an extension, so this post requires and **EDIT to add that.
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