Geometry, pls help fast!!! Unit 3

Question

Exercise 3: Railroads

Railroad tracks’ rails must be a precise distance from each other. If the distance between the rails is too narrow or too wide, the train will derail. Come prepared to discuss the following questions:

1. Imagine traveling back to 1865 when railroads were being built all across the American frontier. How do you think they built the tracks to be the right width apart from each other? What could have gone wrong? Could you teach the railroad workers about parallelism (alternate interior and exterior angles, etc.) so they could always build tracks the right width apart?
2. Do you think it would be practical to use principles of parallelism for building railroads during that time period? Why or why not?
3. What other methods could be used to ensure parallel rails (any method, not just the geometry kinds)?

Answer 1

When thinking about what they could have done...just think of common sense aspects such as pre-measured boards or string. Now parallelism deals with drawing a line through two possibly parallel lines and making sure the angles at the same respective area where that line intersects each potentially parallel line are the same. This is the really short of the long for describing parallelism but it would be so easy to have the rails parallel using parallelism as long as you had a way to measure the angles and you had a straight connecting line.