"Real Life" Dimensional Analysis Problems
Use your own paper to solve these problems – Show your work!!! Circle your answers!!!
1. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the heaviest baby ever born weighed 29
lbs. 4 oz (29.25 lbs). What was the baby's mass in kg?
ANSWER: 13.27 kg
2. A condor has a wing span of 3.05m. What is the wing span in feet?
ANSWER: 10.0 feet
3. In Europe gasoline is sold by the liter. Assume that it takes 14 gallons of gasoline to
fill the tank of a compact car. How many liters of gasoline will it take?
ANSWER: 53 L
4. A single owl can maintain a territory of up to 3.0 acres. How many owls could live
in a large wooded area of 20.0 hectares (1 hectare = 2.47 acres)?
ANSWER: 16 owls
5. Phillip Morris cigarettes have 5.00 mg tar and 0.40 mg nicotine per cigarette and
there are exactly 20 cigarettes per pack.
A. How many packs of cigarettes would have to be smoked to coat your lungs with
4.0 oz (0.25 lb) of tar?
B. How many packs would you have to smoke to damage your lungs by adding 1.0
gram of the drug nicotine.
ANSWERS: A. 1133 packs to deposit 0.25 lb of tar.
B. 125 packs to deposit 1.0 gram of nicotine.
6. Suppose you wanted to smell bad and shorten your life by smoking 1.5 packs of
cigarettes per week. Assuming the average cost of $3.37 a pack, how much money
would you spend on cigarettes after smoking 13 years?
ANSWER $3417.18
7. Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in the 1998 season. Given that there are 4 bases
and 90.0 feet between each base, how many miles did he run that season just from
home runs?
ANSWER: 4.77 miles
8. Suppose that your chemistry teacher empties his dehumidifier tank once a day. If
the capacity of the tank is 2.00 gallons, determine how many molecules of water the
dehumidifier collects from the air per millisecond?
(NOTE: 18.0 grams water = 6.02 x 1023 molecules of water
the density of water = 1.00 g/mL)
ANSWER: 2.9 x1018 molecules/ms
9. A boy who never learned dimensional analysis was working at a fast food place for 35
years wrapping burgers. Each hour he wrapped 184 hamburgers. He worked 8 hours per
day, five days per week. He got paid every 2 weeks with a salary of $840.34. How
many hamburgers will he have to wrap to make his first one million dollars?
ANSWER:
1.75 x 10 burgers.
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10. Eight unidentified spheres have a total mass of 4.35kg. Each has a circumference
of 10.5in. If these spheres are placed in water, would they sink or float?