I need an explanation. Scale drawing, and finding actual distances below.

Question

I had a project where I drew a water park on a graph, and I had to answer some questions about it. I didnt get this part.

Your water park design has been drawn as a blueprint, but to build it, you will need actual dimensions in lieu of the unit dimensions. A large rectangular plot of land has been selected for development, and the city has given approval for construction. Knowing that the actual dimensions for the land is 301m x 196 m in size, determine the scale of your coordinate system.

1st: count the number of spaces along the length of your paper: ____ spaces. (its 38 spaces)

2nd: set a ratio equal to ___ spaces per 301m.

Now, use this ratio to solve for the actual unknown distances by setting up a proportion and calculating. Show your work!

Show your work in the space provided!

I have a graph that I made for a previous part to the project. I had to find the distances between two points on the graph. Now I think I have to find the actual distances, or the unknown. I need to basically find what the distances would be in real life. Here are the distances from the blueprint:

1: 14.04

2: 5.10

3: 14.14

4: 28.18

5: 18.03

etc.

I just need someone to solve only one of them, so I would know how to do the rest.

Answer 1

Hi Rada H.,

There's a crucial piece of information missing from your problem statement. You say the length of the (blueprint) paper is 38 spaces. But, are these the units of measurement you quote (#1 - 5 "etc.")? That's half of what you need to verify. The other thing, only you know: when you set up your initial blueprint, did you scale it as 38 spaces = 301m? I'm guessing not, because you would want a drawing to fill most but not all of the page, so that there is space for title, etc. So, what scaling did you in fact use on your drawing: for example, 30.1 spaces = 301m (i.e. 1 space = 10m) ? Look back and figure that out. That's the number you need for converting your #1-5 data (if as spaces on the blueprint) to "real" distances. By all means feel free to include units on your data, so that you can keep track of units as you do your problems. So a model calculation might be:

4.04 spaces * 10 m real distance/space = 40.4 m real distance .

Hope this helps you!

-- Cheers, -- Mr. d.