Question

Buddy and his team have been asked by NASA to make a space shuttle cake (a scale model shaped like the one to the left) for a fundraising event. The original space shuttle has a height of 184 ft and a wingspan of 78 ft. Buddy and his team decide to construct the cake on-site so that they do not have to worry about transporting it. Buddy decides to make a cake with a wingspan of 10 ft and asks one of his decorators, Ivette, to calculate the height of the cake. Ivette decides that the cake should be approximately 4 ft tall.

Answer 1

Ivette is wrong and by a lot. The spaceship should be 23.59 feet high

Explanation:

The relationship between the spaceship's height and width = 184 feet : 78 feet ≈ 92 : 39 ≈ 9.2 : 3.9. This means that for every 3.9 feet wide, the cake should be 9.2 feet high.

In this case, the spaceship is 10 feet wide, so it should be (10 / 3.9) x 9.2 = 23.59 feet high.

When you make scale drawings or scale cakes, you must keep the same proportions as the original model.