Austin, Aaron and I went for a walk to the park the other morning (Sunday Oct 25). On the way we did a bit of review of circles. We started out by talking about the snowboarding tricks, 360 and 180. Austin right away new that they meant a full and half circle. He then computed 1/4 and 1/8 of a circle as 90 and 45 degrees. We then went on to discuss how this applied to the large sphere we live on, the planet Earth.
If Earth is to be measured as a circle, where does "zero" start? Austin suggested the poles. While that's a sensible place to start, and you can start anywhere you want, the two places most people start from is the equator for the circles that run around the middle (latitude) and a funny place called Greenwich in England for the circles that run through the poles (longitude). We then discussed some of the differences between them e.g. there are 360 degrees of longitude but only 90 degrees of latitude so you need to specify North or South when talking about latitude.
We briefly touched on minutes, the unit of measure smaller than a degree and the fact that 60 minutes make up a degree.
No comments:
Post a Comment