Yesterday my daughter came up with the classic doubt, "I don't
understand what Area is?"... can you help?
Well to begin with a story,
That was the time of river valley civilisations. Man started growing his
own food by the banks of rivers as it was convenient source of water for your
plants. Now, the ‘societies’ or ‘living in groups’ was just beginning and each
one chose a place for themselves. Eventually, the question of "which pace
belongs to whom?" cropped up. Now to measure a piece of land, it is not
enough if you just measured the length! oh there are two sides...
Ok then you measure the length and breath. Is that enough? No... the
land belonging to a person is a closed space you see, with 4 sides. All this
while people had to measure only length or breath. (We say one dimension). Now
they must measure a closed space, which has both length and breath. So, you
need a "New Unit", of measurement (two dimension). That's how they
came up with the concept of "Area of a Space".
Now imagine, this is
a piece of land belonging to you.
How do you create a unit of measurement, with what you already know? Let’s
try.
The smallest unit for measuring length which you use is 1cm? Ok. Now
consider a closed space with all 4 sides=1cm. What shape will it form? It will
be a square. Let’s call this 'a unit square with area 1square cm'.
Area 1 cm2 = 100 mm2
which is 3sq cm in this case. You say the area of your piece of land is 3sq cm. (pictures not to scale)
The unit can be cm, m or any unit you choose; accordingly, the area will be in sq cm, sq m etc.
We have learnt another measurement today and this is for 2d spaces. The unit of Area is sq. units
Let us list the measurements we know -
One Dimension Measures: Length, breath, height
Two Dimension Measures: Area, Perimeter, circumference (for circle)
Inclined Measures: Angle
Revising Metric units of length:
10 mm = 1 cm
10 cm = 1 dm (decimeter)
10 dm = 1m
(100 cm = 1 m)
1000 m = 1 km
That's about it!!!
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