Question

Sense or Nonsense?

Penny wants to make a model of a beetle that is larger than life-size. Penny says she is going to use a scaling factor of 7/12. Does this make sense or is it nonsense? Explain.

Answer 1

If that's how it's displayed, 7/12, then no it doesn't make sense. Using that scale factor is the equivalent shrinking it by 5/12s. And that's not larger than life size. If the scale factor is 7:12, then it would make sense, as the beetle would be 5/19 bigger than the original. It's not much, but it's a start for Penny

Answer 2

Nonsense... The beetle in life size is 12/12 = 1
Therefore, to make a model bigger than this, it would have to be more than 12/12 (1). However, Penny is making it less than 1 whole meaning it would be smaller than life size.
Hope you understand this and it helps (-sorry, it's quite hard to explain!) :-)