How much is too much? We have plenty of space in the back of the car, but when buying bags of sand and pebbles as we did today, the big concern isn’t space, it’s weight. I didn’t want to do more trips to the builders’ merchant than necessary, neither did I want to be the idiot who overloaded her car and gave the AA man a funny story to tell. My solution involved what might be described as non-standard units.
As we stood looking at our trolley of goods, debating whether we already had too much to carry or whether we could manage some more, I realised that I knew what the car could carry safely: the two of us, plus three passengers and a bit of luggage in the back. Now I’m not very good at weights of people in kilograms, but I do know the weights of some cyclists. Adding up the weights of the materials we had so far came to much less than 2 Paolo Bettinis, I was sure we could easily carry more than that. We allowed ourselves a limit of 3 Fabian Cancellaras, which meant we could buy everything we needed. It worked, we made it back up Crookes Mountain with no trouble and without the car feeling overloaded. I like this new unit, next time I’m faced with a similar problem, I’ll be measuring in Cancellaras again.
Image Credit: Fabian Cancellera, cropped by BaldBoris from larger photo ‘Voigt Cancellara TDF 2010 Cambrai ‘by Thomas Ducroquet. Used under Creative Commons Licence, via Wikimedia Commons
Post originally published on More Than a Maths Teacher