Question

if the capacity of a tank is 200000 liters find the length width and height

Answer 1

Answer:

There are an infinite number of possible answers to this question. To help you get started with finding a practical answer, it would help for you to know that 1 L (one litre) can be contained in a cubic space that is 10 cm wide x 10 cm deep x 10 cm tall. (Of course we could consider a cylinder or a sphere as well but containers with rectangular sides are a good starting point.)

if I take the number 55000 and find the cube root I get 38.029525 …. but what does this mean? If I imagine that each of the 55000 litres was in a 10 cm on-each-side cube then each side of the 55000 L cubic container would be a bit more than 38 cubes long. This would translate into a bit more than 380 cm or 3.8 m on each side.

If you don’t like the messy (possibly non-repeating, non-terminating) left over fraction pieces we could see what happens if we pick the nice round number 4.0 m for the width and the ‘depth’ (the measurement of the length of the sides going away from you) and then see how high our container must be to hold all that water.

4.0 metres is the same length as 40 litre cubes so 4.0 m x 4.0 m would give a square base. Dividing 55000 by 40 (one side of the square base in ‘litre cubes’ and then dividing by 40 again (the other side of the square base) gives an answer of 34.375 which translates to 3.4375 m. This would be the height.

Using the same technique we could discover that a tank that is 4.0 m by 5.5 m by 2.5 m would also be big enough to hold 55000 L.

As I said earlier, the possibilities (at least mathematically) are endless.