"The Laughing Cow" Cheese Wedge Containers
You can find more about Laughing Cow cheese wedges at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_vache_qui_rit.
If this math lesson makes you hungry, you can find the wedges for sale at WalMart. Each flat cylindrical carton contains 8 wedges, and the current price at WalMart is $3.00.
Tasks.
1. Find the volume of your Laughing Cow cylinder, measuring in cubic centimeters, using the formula for the volume of a cylinder.
Do you know the formula for the volume of a cylinder? It is
volume = (area of base)*height.
The base of the cylinder is a circle, and the area of a circle is
area = π*r2, where r is the radius.
So the volume of the container is
volume = π*r2*h
We measured the (inside) diameter of the cylinder as 11 cm, so the radius is 5.5 cm. The (inside) height we measured was 2.1 cm. So the (interior) volume of our cylinder was π*5.52*2.1 ≈ 199.6 cu. cm.
Check your answer using rice and a graduated cylinder: Fill the cheese wedge container with rice and pour it into the graduated cylinder. When we did this, the graduated cylinder filled to almost exactly the 200 mL level. Since l cu. cm. = 1 mL, that was pretty close to the amount that we got using the formula!
2. Using cubic centimeter cubes, will 200 of them fit into your cylinder? Why or why not? (We gave it a try...)
3. Using poster board, build a cube that has the same (inside) volume as the cheese wedge cylinder.
What is the edge length of the cube? (We took the cube root of 199.6 and got about 5.84 cm.)
Check that the volume of your cube is the same as the volume of the cheese wedge cylinder by again using rice and the graduated cylinder or the Laughing Cow cylinder.
(We poured the box of rice into the cylinder and again got approximately 200 mL!)
