A scale of a model is the ratio between any length on the model and the corresponding length on actual object.
Item
Model
Actual
House
Height: 6 ft
Height: 30 ft
Garden hose
Length: 12 ft
Length: 20 yd
Practice makes perfect
We want to find the missing dimension using the scale of 1:5. We can recall that a scale of a model is the ratio between any length on the model and the corresponding length on actual object. Next, we can consider the given table.
Item
Model
Actual
House
Height: 6 ft
Height: 30 ft
Garden hose
Length: â–¡ ft
Length: 20 yd
First, we can write that the length scale factor is equal to the ratio of the length of the model hose to the length of the actual hose.
Length Scale Factor=Length of the Model Hose/Length of the Actual Hose
We want to determine the length of the hose in feet. In this case, we know that the actual hose has the length of 20 yards. We can start by converting 20 yards to feet using a conversion factor of 3 ft1 yd.
The actual hose has the length of 60 feet.
Finally, we can substitute 1:5 for the scale factor and 60 feet for the length of the actual hose in our formula. We can also represent the length of the model hose with an arbitrary variable l. Let's solve our formula for l!
Length Scale Factor=Length of the Model Hose/Length of the Actual Hose
