Calculate the volumes of each bale of hay separately and then compare them.
4
Practice makes perfect
We want to find how many square bales of hay it takes to contain the same amount of hay as a large round bale. Let's start by visualizing both types of hay bales.
We will calculate the volume of each type of bale separately and then compare them.
Round Bale
The round bale is cylindrical. This means we can use the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder to find how much hay it contains. We know that the height h is 5 feet and the diameter d is 4 feet. Because we are given the diameter, we should rewrite the radius r as half of the diameter in the formula before substituting our values.
The square bale is a rectangular prism. We can find the volume of a rectangular prism by multiplying the length, width, and height. In our case, the width and height are equal so we can rewrite the equation before substituting.
Finally, we can divide the volume of the round bale by the volume of the square bale to find how many square bales of hay contains the same amount of hay as a round bale
\begin{gathered}
\dfrac{V_\text{Round}}{V_\text{Square}}=\dfrac{{\color{#A800DD}{63}}}{{\color{#FF00FF}{16}}}\approx 4
\end{gathered}
It takes 4 square bales of hay to match the volume in just one round bale of hay.
